


Paper Cages

by orphan_account



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Blood and Violence, F/M, Fights, Gen, Hearing Voices, Implied/Referenced Brainwashing, Light Angst, Major Character Injury, Original Character Death(s), Original Character(s), Panic Attacks, Vigilantism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-23
Updated: 2017-10-23
Packaged: 2019-01-22 00:09:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 29,565
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12469080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: When Grant had become what he was (notwhohe was because he wasn’t a person anymore), it had been with the sole intent of finding the man who had stolen nearly two years of his life and then disappeared. Doing this—going after petty criminals—was a way to pass the time, to atone for what he had done during those seven-hundred-and-thirty days, although some may suggest that not killing people and possibly volunteering at a soup kitchen was more apt because you don’t use blood to wash away blood.It didn’t make him feel better. It was just something to do.





	1. PROLOGUE

**Author's Note:**

> I said I wasn’t going to write fic anymore, that I was done, and I’ve said that before but I seriously meant it this time. I swear I did. But then I started thinking about Grant Ward again. And then I re-watched a few episodes from the first half of season one. And then this.
> 
> It’s an AU because of course it is, that’s the only thing I’m sort of good at.

Grant Ward hasn’t felt like a person in a very long time.

He doesn’t exactly feel _non-human_ either. He feels like nothing which, somehow, is worse. The closest word he can scrounge up for it is ‘ghost’ but that’s not exactly right either because he doesn’t feel dead. He wishes he _was_ more often than not, which some professionals in white coats would say is why he runs around the city with guns, dressed in black, going after bad guys (not _bad guys_ as in: comic book super villains but _bad guys_ as in: guys who were really, really bad and also human, unlike him) but professionals hadn’t done Grant any good and there’s never been a moment in his life where they’d ever led him to believe they knew what was best for him or why he did what he did.

He’s thinking about this because he doesn’t have much else to think about while he waits for this one particular guy to leave the poker game he’s running in a bar that had been foreclosed on about a month ago. Grant doesn’t make a habit out of staking out anybody; he usually just stumbles on a problem or marches in head-first because if he _wanted_ to be a detective he would have stayed in the academy but this man was a bit different and so that required a slight shift in the way things were done.

Grant’s been lying on this apartment roof since midnight and now it was almost three in the morning and the only thing he was regretting was not bringing any music to distract him from his own thoughts and the voice that’s been living in the back of his head since he left where he used to be and sometimes liked to babble. Thankfully, tonight it’s been mostly silent, like it knew he was working, that this was important and required focus. It still had things to say occasionally though, none of which were particularly helpful.

There’s a low pain throbbing across his back, from one shoulder blade to the other but he can’t move because then he’d have to spend twenty minutes readjusting so he tries to ignore it, same as he’s trying to ignore _everything else_ and just as he’s beginning to consider giving up—that maybe this was one of those games that goes until daylight or they’d left out the back even though he’d made sure to check and found the door chained shut which is why he hadn’t worried about it (until now)—the front door opens the same time as a voice behind him says:

“You tryin’ to kill someone, jackass?” Grant pulls his eye away from the scope and glances at the sky because _really_? This? And also: _no kidding_ he was trying to kill someone. He drops his shoulders, turns the best he can from where he’s lying on his belly and there, just a few feet away, is a big fucking guy who Grant recognizes as the bodyguard for the person he’s going after. He wasn’t supposed to be here tonight, it’s why Grant chose this game in particular. Either he’d gotten some faulty information or this man was _severely_ attached to his boss and shadowed him even when he wasn’t wanted.

He seems like he’s actually giving Grant a chance to answer.

“Well, I’m not birdwatching,” he says. He takes a chance to flicker his gaze towards the building across the street. The man he’s after is acting like he’s at a holiday party, saying goodbye to his friends but still talking to them at the door. Grant _could_ try to get a shot off now but he’d have to aim again and the bodyguard might have a knife in Grant’s brainstem before he could tap the trigger. So. First things first.

He’s on his feet, knows he has a sidearm but that would make too much noise and he’s still holding out hope that he’ll be able to pull this off so he throws a punch instead, catches the guy right across the jaw, doesn’t waste time in delivering another, this one to the side of his head, trying to stun him. It does, but not enough and he gets a healthy hit to his stomach for his trouble. Gravel crunches under their feet, Grant blocks the fist coming at his throat, grips it and gives him exactly what he had been trying to give Grant, listens to him choke and wheeze, lets go of the fist he was still holding and slams knuckles into the side of his head again. He catches him as he starts to go down, moves around behind him, wraps an arm around his neck, another draped over the top of his head, holding him still, keeps him that way until he passes out.

Either he was a bargain-bin bodyguard or Grant was holding aces tonight because that could have gone a heck of a lot worse. Speaking of aces: he’s back on the ground, hunched over, picks up his rifle, eye pushed to the scope and he spits out a curse. A car with tinted windows has pulled up to the curb and the guy he’s after is nowhere to be seen. He’s already walked away and Grant hadn’t seen which direction he went. He’s in the car and he’s got no way of knowing _where_ exactly he’s sitting. It didn’t matter which one. He screwed up. _That’s_ what mattered.

His options were to go home and try again later or abandon stealth and go after him in the more familiar way.

( _And I’m floating in the most peculiar way. And the stars look very different today_. Grant doesn’t have the heart to tell the voice that ‘familiar’ and ‘peculiar’ weren’t the same words. It probably already knew that.)

The fire-escape clangs under his boots as he runs down it, the rifle awkwardly clutched in his hands, held against his chest, and if it were a shotgun or a pistol he would have just left it behind because he could always find another one—he wasn’t particularly sentimental about his weapons—but this was the only sniper rifle he had and most likely _would_ have. He runs out from the alley, moves across the street, and the men still lingering stare in shock because they know who he is. Hands are going to waists, to holsters, and he leaps up on the hood of the vehicle, his feet denting the metal, going _thunk, thunk_ with the impact.

He stands over them and is surprised when they don’t immediately start shooting but he supposes they figure since _he_ hadn’t yet, that maybe he wasn’t there for them.

(They know who he is which means they also know how he works. If he wanted them dead, they’d already be dead and he’d only fight, he’d only _kill_ , if he (or somebody innocent) was provoked.

 _Don’t poke the bear._ )

“Landry Omdahl,” he says. Just that. Nothing else. A meaty finger points to the right at the exact same time something sharp lodges itself in his shoulder. He sends out a quick exhale through his nose, turns, searches, and there, up on the roof he’d just vacated, was the bodyguard, arm still raised from when he’d thrown his small knife. Maybe not bargain bin after all. He waits for the gunfire but there isn’t any and the guard disappears, obviously on his way to him because cutlery was all he had or his gun didn’t have the same range a projectile did and Grant hops off the car, drops his rifle, pulls out his pistol and points it at the head of the man closest to him, hears the _click click click_ of at least three others guns being aimed at his head. “Pull it out.”

The man complies. These were small-timers, but long-timers: not new enough to have the over-inflated egos of having to prove themselves and minor-league enough to know their lives weren’t worth getting into a fight with Ward. (They were all the types of bad guys that Grant tended to put down, the people who did terrible things but hadn’t been caught or, worse, had been let go because they knew the names and deeds of people much higher on the food chain than them. He _could_ do something about it now but that wasn’t why he was here and Omdahl was already a block or two ahead of him. He knew their faces. He could find them again.) He breathes out slowly, through the pain, and then spins around, positions his rifle on the roof of the vehicle and he idly wonders why the thing hasn’t booked it yet, figures the driver is one of the men still standing behind him, one of the men he was now trusting to not slit his throat.

Grant doesn’t like to shoot his rifle like this, not without preparation, but there’s no time and this is the easiest, quickest way to handle things. He leans his eye to the scope, watches the bodyguard burst out of the alley and slam on the brakes when he sees him, the _oh shit_ look flash across his face, and he pulls the trigger, body vibrating with the kickback. Grant brings the gun back down, slides the strap hooked to it over his head, the weight heavy across his back, pulling on his knife wound, probably making it worse but as long as he can walk he’ll be fine and then he’s off without so much as a glance back to the men he’s leaving behind, sprinting down the sidewalk in the direction that finger pointed him in.

He catches up with Omdahl fairly easily, is grateful they’re still in an area that was mostly empty. He grabs him from behind, hand over his mouth, drags him into a dead-end alleyway and does what he needed to do, does it with too much noise but nobody around here was going to complain.

 

— — — —

 

This wasn’t, as it is with most people, the way things were supposed to be but, unlike everyone, Grant can’t remember exactly what it was that he wanted.

It certainly wasn’t this.


	2. PAPER CAGES

‘Patrolling’ is not something that Grant does. He may leave his warehouse on the odd night, take the van and go out, drive around for an hour or two in places he knows the probability of stumbling onto trouble were higher than normal but that didn’t mean he purposely went looking for people to _save_.

When he’d become what he was (not _who_ he was because he wasn’t a _person_ anymore), it had been with the sole intent of finding the man who had stolen nearly two years of his life and then disappeared. Doing this—going after petty criminals—was a way to pass the time, to atone for what he had done during those seven-hundred-and-thirty days, although some may suggest that _not_ killing people and possibly volunteering at a soup kitchen was more apt because you don’t use blood to wash away blood.

It didn’t make him feel better. It was just something to do.

On this particular night, though, he was coming up empty. There were places he could go, certainly. Doors he could kick in where he knew shady things were going on (were _always_ going on), there were the men at the Omdahl poker game who he could drop in on, catch them with their pants down (metaphorically _or_ literally—it wouldn’t be the first time for the latter). He had a tip, too, about the man he was after but it was vague, not something he could actively do anything with until the person who had given it to him called him back with more information and there was no solid timeline on when that would be. So here he was, parking his van in a nearly empty lot and walking a couple blocks, just in case.

He stops on a corner, closes his eyes and just _listens_ for a moment but the only thing he hears is the city murmuring and rushing, a character all in of itself but, just then, only a few feet away: the sounds of a struggle. Eyes open and there, straight ahead, a woman fighting against a man much larger than she was; he watches as she manages to get away only for a big hand to grasp her hair, yank her back. The woman yelps, the knife the man is holding glints under the streetlight and Grant starts to run.

The woman sees Grant coming before the man who’s attacking her does and her eyes widen, mouth slightly agape, stops squirming, and her lack of movement is enough for the man to realize something in the air has changed and he looks up just in time to get the gift of a fist crunching his nose. He howls, blood gushes, and he lets go of the woman because he’d be an _idiot_ not to now that he’s got bigger prey to deal with but, to his credit, he recovers fairly quickly, looks pissed as hell, and launches himself forward. He leads with his arm already swinging for a hit, knuckles connecting with the spot just between Grant’s ear and eye, which rattles him enough that he can’t move away from the blow to his cheek which has him bite his lip, splitting it (but at least it wasn’t his tongue) and he’s only aware of the hand grabbing around the back of his neck long after it’s already there. The man pulls him close, the lower half of his face slick with red and, for a confusing moment, Grant thinks he’s going to kiss him but then there’s a sharp pain in his side and he looks down to see part of the knife he’d noticed earlier now stuck inside of him.

His arm his flexing, fingers tensing as he prepares to push it in further but Grant manages to stop him, holds him still, takes in the look of surprise on the man’s face and he shakes his head, just subtly. He uses his other arm to punch him once, twice, three times, milliseconds apart in the same spot, right on the temple and, as he’s going down, he keeps him on his feet for just long enough to pull the knife out of his own side, jam it into the man’s shoulder, reach in his holster for his silenced sidearm and shoot him point-blank in the heart.

Grant drops him, watches him fall, hitting the concrete with a _thud_ , a startled look stuck on his face for all eternity, reminiscent of the one the woman had given Grant when she’d seen him barrelling towards her: _I can’t believe this is happening_. Despite the man’s size, the fight hadn’t lasted nearly as long as Grant thought it might and he gives himself a second to allow his heart to slow before he puts his gun back where it came from and then turns to acknowledge the woman still standing there, hands gripped tight around the strap of her leather satchel.

“You’re hurt,” she says with a clear accent, says it like there wasn’t the dead body of a person who had, only moments before, been trying his damndest to get something from her and hadn’t cared how he got it and the words sound so genuinely bewildered that Grant almost laughs. Maybe she was a little stunned after all.

(He hears the voice, distorted as always, neither male nor female: _You didn’t have to kill him_.

Probably not. The man had a decent knife—not a kitchen blade, something tactical—so perhaps caution wasn’t the best option on this one. Muggers had some pretty slick gear these days, made him wonder why they even bothered trying to rob people. Sell that knife, they’d have enough for a meal or two or to pay back the bookie they owe.)

“Comes with the territory,” he tells her. The knife hadn’t gone in too deep, had just barely pierced his side but then he sees that she’s looking at his face, at his swelling lip and realizes that she might not even _know_ he’s been stabbed. He’s wearing all black and blood does have a tendency to blend in, especially at night. He takes one step towards the body, debating whether or not to take it with him, deposit it somewhere far away from her in some dumpster, preferably one with rotten food because then it might take a day or two for someone to find it.

Grant decides to leave him because there’s nothing other than the woman he was helping to tie him to this and anybody else who may have been watching from a window would likely recognize him and know better than to call the cops—at least not until long after he was gone. That and, ultimately, he wasn’t worth the effort. He starts to leave instead but then he hears the woman say _wait_. He does even though he knows he shouldn’t.

(He tries not to make a habit out of sticking around after doing something like this, only does it if the person he got out of a scrape has been physically injured (worse than a couple bumps and scratches) and then he’ll stick around just long enough for the ambulance to be visible in the distance. Only twice has he actually taken someone directly to the hospital, bundled up in the passenger seat of his van. He’s not an _emotions_ kind of guy. Everyone needs someone to talk to after this sort of thing no matter how brief because violence is always going to be violence and not many people are as used to it as he is, but he’s never going to be that someone. Grant wouldn’t be surprised if there were support groups that existed specifically for people who have found themselves present to his particular brand of justice.)

“You’re hurt,” she repeats. Did she get hit in the head somehow? There’d been a moment when she was dislodging herself from the man’s grip after Grant had punched him the first time where there were too many flailing limbs. He’s opening his mouth to say something but then she says: “I can help you.”

“I don’t need you to,” he says, which is the truth. He can patch himself up, has done it more times than he can count and, when he can’t, he’ll just lay in bed until his body either sorts itself out or he dies. So far, it’s always been the former. Resiliency, luck, and the voice in his head. They’ve been some of the only constants for awhile now and he’s fine with keeping it that way. She’s going to speak again but he won’t let her because he knows the next words out of her mouth were going to be something along the lines of _there must be something I can do to thank you_. “Go home.”

There’s a wailing, a moan of sirens that he knows all too well. He has to go, if he doesn’t leave now they’ll catch up to him and he doesn’t have any friends on the force that were willing to accidentally leave the cell door unlocked. They only do that for _heroes_. They only do that for the folk who don’t kill. He turns, starts to make his way down the sidewalk and he’s not moving as fast as he could be, figures that the knife wound was maybe a little bit deeper than he originally figured it was but he doesn’t have time to think about it, he just has to push through.

_Push. Push, pull, fall. Earth below us, drifting, falling, floating weightless, calling, calling home..._

“Shut up,” he grumbles, says it out the side of his mouth. He’d rather the voice kept telling him what he should and shouldn’t do instead of its word association thing, its mangled voice picking a word and then another, taking one or two and then starting to sing. Grant had known someone a long, long time ago when he was still in training who used to pick up phrases and always somehow knew a song that matched it. You asked him to pass you the sugar and he’d start singing out of tune Def Leppard. Grant had always hated that and the voice doing it hadn’t awakened any new appreciation, like eating a vegetable as an adult that you were disgusted by when you were a kid and discovering that the flavor isn’t actually all that bad.

(It was a different song most of the time but it seemed to have a particular affinity for lyrics about a man called Major Tom which, really, only amounted to _two_. Grant wished he was ignorant as to why. He wished he could have forgotten.)

There are footsteps behind him and then beside him and, at first, he figures he’d been too stupidly lost in thought to notice the police sneaking up on him but then he sees it’s her. There are no cars, no flashing lights. Maybe he had overreacted and they weren’t coming for him, just a badly-timed sound that gave him a good excuse to leave. Better safe than sorry in his line of work.

“I told you to go home,” he says and she frowns, lines worrying between her brow as she keeps pace with him.

“I am,” she says. “Would it really kill you if you walked me there?” She’s asking him to without actually asking. _It might_ , he thinks, holds his hand tighter against his wound.

“Fine,” he says. He expects her to chatter, to prattle on because that’s what a lot of people do when they’re scared but she’s quiet, walks beside him, half a step ahead because she knows where she’s going and he doesn’t. They wind up not being particularly far from her building, only a ten minute walk, and she stops in front of a set of stone stairs, holds her arms around herself but won’t go inside. “He can’t get to you.” That had to be what it was. “‘Night.” He goes to head back the way he came, to where he parked so he could go home and get some stitches into himself but she’s telling him to _stop_ , to wait again but this time he doesn’t because if he did it for her, he’d have to start doing to for _everyone_ and then he’d never sleep.

What he doesn’t anticipate is that she’d chase after him, jump out in front of him, stand her ground. He stops, just like she wanted. She shifts, one foot to the other and, just as he’s getting ready to march right over her if he has to (in a way that doesn’t actually hurt her), she says:

“I believe us meeting tonight may have been fortuitous.” A pause. “More than just you rescuing me.” Another hesitation. “I could use your help. I’m in a bit of trouble.”

“Listen, lady—”

“Jemma,” she interrupts. “Jemma Simmons.”

“Alright. Jemma. I don’t— I’m not the person you want.” He doesn’t even need to hear what it is; the types of people who call on him for assistance don’t tend to call when they need him to fix something so benign that it could be defined as such a mild word as ‘trouble’.

“I’m not so sure,” Jemma says, “But, either way, you seem to be what I’ve got.” A sigh and Grant doesn’t realize that she’d been doing her level best to _avoid_ looking at him until she’s actually staring directly into his eyes. “At least hear me out.” He matches her gaze for what feels like an uncomfortably long time. He’s not going to tell her to _go to the police_ because he’s not naive, he knows that anyone who’s willing to come to _him_ with their issues (no matter how small) had either already asked the authorities and been laughed out the door or they knew that was exactly where they were going to end up anyway.

“Listen...” He takes in a slow breath, is acutely aware of the fact that he’s been bleeding from his side this entire time, and tries again, tries to say what he was going to before she had to go and tell him her name, “You’ve had a rough night and that’s the worst time to be making a choice like that.” It was the adrenaline, the nerves, and it wouldn’t be the last time that someone he helped out would beg him for assistance with whatever they’ve got itching on their skin like a dog with fleas and Grant is definitely not anybody’s flea collar. People who witnessed what he did and then immediately decided that he was exactly what they needed weren’t the types of people he generally helped. He was a last resort. It was possible that was what he was to Jemma, especially considering her telling him that he was _what she’s got_ but, in the end, he’s better off just treating her like everybody else. “Sleep it off.” His turn to pause. “If you wake up in the morning and you still think this is the right choice for you, we can talk again.”

“How will I find you?” Jemma asks. It’s a fair question. It’s not exactly like he has business cards.

“I’ll be in the area in a couple days.”

“A couple _days_?” Not happy. He tilts his head slightly, lifts a shoulder as if to silently tell her that that’s the best he can do and then, finally, he steps around her and leaves. She doesn’t stop him.

 

— — — —

 

“I told you—” The person on the other end of the line sounds annoyed and Grant doesn’t blame her. He knows _exactly_ what she had told him because they’d only had this conversation yesterday but, if his methods were any indication, patience wasn’t always his greatest virtue. “—I’ll call you when I get more information.” Grant pulls a hand over his face, keeps up his pacing, absently presses his thumb against the sloppy-but-tight stitches in his side, grinds his back teeth together. “I have none, thus, I have not called.”

“I get it, Daisy,” he says. “I just—”

“I know,” she tells him. He can hear the sound of her fingers tapping on a keyboard, _clack clack clack_ . She does get it, in her own way. She understands and she’s probably one of the only ones who does, which is why he’s trusted her. Not with _everything_ because there would never be anybody he’d go that far with, but more so than anyone in a very long time. He didn’t know much about her but he didn’t need to. They’d met in person twice, which was fine for the both of them—once when he’d saved her, and once last Christmas. And that, as he’d said, was enough. “You, uh…” A cleared throat. She must not have been at work because she wouldn’t keep talking to him if she were. “You doing alright?”

He sighs, stops moving, looks out through the cracks in the dirty window stretched out over the table littered with bullets and disassembled weapons, folders and paper in mis-matched stacks because he wasn’t someone who had a corkboard with string and tacks and post-its with question marks and names.

_All right. All left. Still in one piece. Has to count for something._

Sometimes, the voice wasn’t an asshole.

“Dude,” she says and he realizes he hasn’t said anything in a few seconds too long.

“I’m fine,” he lies, just as he always does when she asks.

“You know you can tell me stuff if you need to,” she says, just as she always does. “Two way street.”

“Right,” he says. “Keep digging.”

“I never stop,” she says and hangs up without saying goodbye.

 

— — — —

 

He goes to the bar anyway, the name she had slipped him, the vague piece she was still trying to form a coherent shape out of, does exactly what he shouldn’t but he has _nothing else_ and how goddamn wretched was that. Not as wretched, he thinks, as the place he’s just walked into, packed full at noon on a Tuesday.

( _All I wanna do_ , the voice sings, _is have some fun_. It’s not entirely wrong, which makes his gut curdle because he doesn’t ever really want to _enjoy_ any part of this. But, if he doesn’t, then what does this mean? Compulsion? That’s not any better.)

The windows had been painted over, slapdash with black that was already peeling and, even in the red and orange lights twisted into the ceiling, the neon flashing brand names Grant would never recognize, he can see thumb and fingerprints dried into the paint from people who had dug their hands in before it had set and he wonders if someone had done this drunk and decided not to scrape it away once they were sober (if they ever were). Nobody pays him any mind but he didn’t expect them to; he hadn’t kicked down the door, hadn’t shouted, started shooting. That wasn’t the point of this, not this time. Not yet. Not if he didn’t have to.

( _Don’t poke the bear._ )

Right up to the bar, stands between a man in a shabby suit, his stubble a few days old, and an old man that smelled like the docks but wasn’t dressed like he’d been there and the man behind the counter eyes him, thick brows in need of a trim furrowed, but he didn’t look like the type of guy who would do it himself or had a woman at home to clean it up for him.

“What you want?”

“J—” Grant stutters, chokes on the name because just summoning it tastes sour. He could think it but he couldn’t speak it. He should write it on a flashcard, show it to people when he needs to. It’d make things easier, wouldn’t have to utter his name again until he finally has him on his knees. Steel himself, clench his jaw. “John Garrett.”

“Who?” Bad liar. (Or Grant just wants him to be.) The man in the shabby suit looks up from his beer, frowns, turns his glass, dripping with condensation.

“You heard me,” Grant says, because he won’t say it again. Once today was enough.

“I did,” the bartender says, “I just don’t know who you’re talking about.”

“I was told that he had been here. Might have been here. That someone here knew about him.”

“Well, which one is it?” The bartender asks and the shabby suit shifts, teeth clenched, and he pulls up the right side of his mouth in an anxious sneer. He starts to stand like he’s going to leave, drink unfinished, but Grant reaches over without looking, grabs the back of his neck, pushes him back down and slams the side of his head against the bar. Only the people in the immediate area react (fights might not be uncommon around here) but nobody does anything to help.

“Where is he?” Grant asks him, leans down to get a decent look at his face, at his watery, red eyes.

“I don’t know!” The man says, tries to push against Grant’s hand, manages to lift his head an inch or two but Grant shoves him back down. “I don’t—”

“Whatever you know, Phil,” the bartender says, surprisingly calm, “I suggest you tell ‘em.”

“Yeah, _Phil_ ,” Grant agrees, digs his fingers in a little, hears shabby-suited Phil grunt. Grant would chalk this up to luck on his side again, to coincidence, but this is the type of place that had regulars. He could have shown up yesterday or a week from now and Phil would probably have been here, same stool, same glass.

“I swear I don’t know where he is,” Phil says, his voice rising in panic, concern for his life. Grant has no plans on killing him but he doesn’t have to know that if it’ll get the information out of him faster. “I’ve done some work for him in the past. I thought we—” Another grunt, more pressure from Grant’s fingers and he hadn’t even realized he’d done it. “—I thought we were done but he showed up at my office.” (It was hard to believe that a guy like this had one of those but stranger things have happened.) “He asked me for a favor.”

“What kind of favor?” Whatever someone like him would need, it wasn’t good. “What do you do?”

“I’m a lawyer. And I don’t know! I— He said he just wanted to know if I was still willing. If— If— he came back later he could call on me for it and I’d do whatever he asked. He left but he didn’t say where he was going or when he’d be back or why he was even here in the first place.” Grant was inclined to think he was being honest. (He couldn’t think of a clear reason as to why he’d want to be in the city right now, but Grant hadn’t particularly been keeping up with his project since he left either. He didn’t want to know. He just wanted to find him, to make him pay.)

“You got a card?”

“What?” Phil asks, confused, because that definitely wasn’t what he was expecting to hear after all of that.

“A business card,” Grant clarifies and he lets his hand up just enough to give Phil a chance to nod, which he does and then blindly reaches towards his back pocket, awkwardly pulls out his wallet. Grant snatches it from him, flips it open and takes a card from where it had been stuffed between crumpled dollar bills. He slaps the wallet down on the counter instead of putting it back where it had come from. “Now I know where you work. Don’t stop being a regular here. He shows up again, I’ll know where to find you.” It’d be easy for him to run, to agree just to get him off his back like he had when that man had come asking for a favor, but he doesn’t seem the type.

Grant picks up Phil’s beer, considers polishing it off before he walks out but overturns the glass and dumps it over Phil’s head instead.

 

— — — —

 

Grant’s phone had been vibrating the entire time he was inside but he doesn’t answer it until he’s back out on the sidewalk, standing in front of the door. Someone starts to come towards the bar like he wants to go in but he very nearly audibly squeals to a halt when he see’s Grant, turns and goes back the way he came, obviously unable to figure out if Ward was coming or going but, to him, it didn’t matter; the fact that he was there at all was concerning and he was apparently in no mood today to deal with it.

“ _There_ you are,” Daisy says. “I’ve been trying to— Nevermind. I’ve got the name of the guy you’re gonna want to talk to. Had to use a snow shovel instead of a trowel on this one.” A pause, waiting for him to get the joke. “Because you told me to keep digging.” A quick exhale through her nose. “I’ll get a laugh out of you one day, Ward, mark my words.” _Clack clack clack_. “Okay, well, his name’s—”

“Philip Goff, Esquire,” Grant says, reads it off the business card he was still holding. A lengthy silence and then:

“Why do I even bother?”

“You found the start of the thread,” Grant tells her, “I just followed it.”

“Sure,” Daisy says. “Or you were just both insanely impatient and ridiculously hashtag blessed.” Grant thinks he’s the least blessed person he knows but he doesn’t tell her that. “Did you get anything helpful out of it at least?”

“Maybe,” Grant says, tells her everything Phil had told him and he listens to her stewing it over.

“This is the closest we’ve ever gotten,” Daisy says. Not ‘you’. _We_ . “How’re you feeling?” Grant wasn’t sure. When he’d first heard Phil say that _he_ had been in the city, that he’d been here _recently_ and Grant hadn’t known, a ringing started in his ears, his chest going cold. The realization that he was probably going to come back, maybe soon, maybe next month but, either way, he would be here, was almost too much for him to process. Daisy seems to take his silence as him not going to give her an answer. “You want me to tag Goff? Keep an eye on him?”

“Sure,” Grant says, grateful for her changing the subject. “But watch yourself. I don’t want him to catch you.” They both know he’s not talking about Phil.

 

— — — —

 

Grant’s ‘in the area’ exactly when he had told Jemma Simmons that he would be and if he happens to drive past her building a couple times, that may just be because of the route he decided to take that particular night. She isn’t out there, she’s not waiting for him on her steps and he doesn’t see her on the street he’d found her on (doesn’t see the body of the mugger either, just a stain and a piece of yellow caution tape still wrapped around a street lamp, fluttering in the faint breeze coming in from the river a few miles away) and there aren’t any police wandering, searching for him. It’s possible that they just didn’t think it was worth it to track Ward down for something like this or maybe someone had come to claim the body before the authorities.

(For all Grant knew, that police tape may have been there already and he just hadn’t noticed until now.)

There’s a diner just on the perimeter of the zone he’d been moving in that he’s stopped in once or twice when he needed to cool his heels, collect himself, pulling paper napkins from the holders to clean himself up. He’s fairly certain that the work staff inside knows who he is but, so far, none of them have given him any indication that they were going to call someone they thought were important about it. Maybe they appreciated what he did or maybe they just didn’t care.

He’s sitting at a table in the center of the room, away from the windows, a coffee in front of him, still thinking about what Phil had said, what Daisy had asked him. There were a lot of things he had packed away in boxes, stored in the dark parts of his head, knew he wouldn’t have to drag them back out into the light until he’d found who he was looking for but, since he’d never known when that might be, he hadn’t spent too much time concerning himself with it. But now here he was, the possibility of having him at his mercy surprisingly within reach and he felt… overwhelmed. He’d have to take it apart in pieces or else it all threatened to drown him but he didn’t know where to do any of that safely. He certainly couldn’t do it on his own, no matter how desperately he wished he could.

A shadow falls over him, a voice says _oh_ and it sounds familiar. Grant lifts his head, looks up to see Jemma standing there. What’s the word she had used? _Fortuitous_.

She looks tired.

“I’ve thought about it,” she says, looks at the empty chair across from him. “May I?” He wants to say no, but he’d also told her that if she still felt like he was solution to her problem after getting some rest they could talk and he’s having a tough time internally justifying going back on his promise to her. He nods. She pulls the chair out gingerly so the legs don’t make noise scraping along the tile floor and she folds her hands in front of her before changing her mind, resting her palms on her thighs. A waitress—the same one who brought Grant his coffee—comes over with a menu but Jemma tells her _no thank you_ , orders a coffee and a slice of apple pie.

“Whipped cream?” The waitress asks and Jemma glances at Grant before she answers, says _no_ , as if she wanted to appear tough in front of him and wanting whipped cream on her dessert would ruin that facade. She brushes a piece of hair behind her ear like she’s not used to having it down and waits for her food to arrive before she says anything else.

“I work for SHIELD,” Jemma says, talks quietly as if she’s afraid someone might overhear but there aren’t too many people in here this time of night. Grant wonders what she’s doing awake, what reason she had to be wandering at two in the morning. Maybe she had been looking for him.

“The bioengineering company,” Grant clarifies and she lets out a _mhm_ in affirmation. Smart cookie. Place like SHIELD only hires the best and the brightest. She used present tense instead of past, which meant she hadn’t been fired, hadn’t quit, wasn’t on the _run_ from anything or anyone per se, but, then again, Grant hadn’t known SHIELD to be the type to go after their own employees. He wouldn’t go so far as to use the word ‘respectable’, though. Never that.

“There is one big rule there. One no-no.” She picks up her fork, pokes the tines into the crust of her pie but then lets it go, changes her mind. “Do not use company property to develop personal or otherwise independent projects while in the facility and do not _remove_ company property from the facility to develop—” An exhale. “You get the picture. I’m a rule follower, Mister Ward. At least I like to maintain that I am.”

“Just… Ward, is fine.”

“Ward. Right. I follow rules. I’ve never broken one in my life.” Anyone else saying that to Grant, he would have laughed and not believed a single word but, staring at her now, he doesn’t doubt her in the slightest. “We either develop our ideas on our own time which is nearly impossible or we take our ideas to our bosses and let them decide if it’s worthwhile. Approval. It’s rare for them not to approve something.” She frowns. “People did it anyway. But not me. Never me.” Fork replaced with spoon, dropped into her mug, stirring, stirring even though she hadn’t added milk or sugar, as if she just needed something to do with her hands. He waits for it. “Until last week.”

“What happened last week?” He doesn’t need to ask, figures she would have told him unprompted, but he does it anyway, just to let her know he was still listening. So far, this didn’t sound anything like what he was useful for, but he’d said they would talk. So they’re talking.

“I came up with an idea for— for something. I took it to my superiors and they… they red stamped it.” She realizes he doesn’t understand what that means but, judging by her expression when she says it, he gets the gist. “They said no.” He narrows his eyes at her and she shakes her head, puts up a hand. “It’s not bad. Dangerous. I swear.” (People have been swearing a lot to him lately.) “I don’t know why they red— why they said no. They wouldn’t explain it to me. I tried to put it off to the side but my friend Fitz— He was so encouraging and I had so much faith in it…”

“You worked on it anyway.”

“I worked on it anyway. Overtime. Lunch. I finished it and it worked.” A subtle, barely noticeable quirk of the side of her mouth. _Pride_.

(The voice sings ‘Proud Mary’ at him and then: _Smart cookie. Sweet._ Grant clears his throat, takes a drink from his mug. The coffee is cold.)

“SHIELD found out. You got in trouble,” Grant guesses but Jemma is shaking her head at him again.

“They didn’t. But somehow, someone from HYDRA did.” HYDRA. Rival company. They did very, _very_ basically the same thing as SHIELD, just not for the right reasons and not for the right people. Nobody was sure how they managed to keep the lights on considering what people knew but Grant figured it boiled down to one thing: money. Grant had a roundabout history with them, through the man he was after, through John Garrett and what he had done to—done _with_ —his trainees. The ringing in his ears starts again. He wanted very much to never have to deal with them but there was a part of him that also very, very much wanted to deal with them because it was about goddamn time. Jemma is still talking and Grant tunes back in but he hasn’t missed too much. If she noticed any shift in his face or his body language, she didn’t mention it. Either she was terrible at reading people or he had managed to keep his face placid. “I don’t know how— Maybe someone told them or they have someone on the inside… Corporate espionage is surprisingly common in my line of work.”

“You said it wasn’t dangerous,” Grant says.

“It isn’t!”

“Then why does HYDRA want it?”

“Because it _could_ be. Anything that SHIELD creates _could_ conceivably be made to harm. Some are just easier to alter than others and apparently they’ve decided that what _I’ve_ made is one of those things. I just don’t know—”

“What about that Fitz you mentioned?” Grant asks.

“No,” Jemma immediately insists, uses her hands to enforce that, repeats it a few times before saying: “Absolutely not. He would never—” Hesitation. There’s sadness around her eyes now and she looks away from him, down at her lap. “He’s actually the main reason I need your help.” She looks at him again. “I’m afraid HYDRA has taken him.”

“They kidnapped him.” Not a question.

“He left work. Never came back. I called and called but he didn’t answer and then two days ago my phone rings and it’s him. He tells me that he’s happy. That he _wants_ to be there but I could tell he was distressed. It was a _lie_ Mister Ward.” Grant doesn’t correct her this time. “I know him very well and I believe they’re holding him as leverage. They’ve tried repeatedly to take it by force and now they’re using other, much more underhanded means. They’ve taken my friend.” Mouth in a thin line, she squares her shoulders. “I want you to get him out.”

Now he understands why she had thought she needed him: because she actually did. Grant couldn’t think of anyone who would be stupid or reckless enough to go storming into the closest HYDRA facility to get someone out except for him. He doesn’t ask her if she’s sure, if she’s really, honestly positive that her friend hadn’t switched sides, been made a better offer or had worked for them the entire time. He doesn’t ask because this is HYDRA and taking a person just to get something that might be beneficial to them was _exactly_ the type of thing they would do. It’s not even the _worst_ thing they could do (that they’ve probably done).

“And before you say anything, giving them what I’ve created is not an option. I don’t believe they’d let him go if I did.” She’s probably right. Hands on the table, fingers curling around the edge, pads of her thumbs pressing into the metal. “Will you help me? Again.” Grant looks at his coffee. He looks out the window. He looks at his hands.

_Revenge is a dish best served cold. Time it may take us but God only knows, how I've paid for those things in the past. "What will it affect when all is done?" thinks Major Tom._

Those were two different songs. That wasn’t fair.

“Alright,” Grant says. Jemma startles as if that wasn’t the answer she was anticipating but then, slowly, she smiles but it doesn’t last long. Finally, she lifts her fork, cuts a piece of her pie, the crust flaking, the filling leaking onto the white plate.

“Where do we start?”

 

— — — —

 

Grant tells her to go home, writes the number for his most recent disposable cellphone on a napkin with a pen borrowed from the waitress, tells her to call him if they try anything but _only_ for that, nothing else, and that he’d find her when he’s got the beginnings of a plan because for this, he was going to need the bare bones of one if he wanted to at least make it so Jemma’s friend had a chance of seeing daylight again. That meant knowing everything he could about the building before even so much as taking a stroll past it. He needed to know _exactly_ where Fitz was could be being held, where he was being made to work, and what defenses he was going to have to blast through.

His best bet would be to target someone who worked there, someone who actually left the building on a regular basis, who had a life, made a commute. He hasn’t done this sort of work in a long time—before Garrett even, as far as he remembered—and getting back into it wasn’t going to be easy. Maybe all it was instead was finding a balance, something between his old self and the nothing with guns that he was now.

Daisy was what he used to be in the past. He himself was his present. But what the hell was his future?

And why, more importantly, was he considering that he might have one?

 

— — — —

 

“HYDRA? Are you sure?” Daisy asks later when Grant calls her because he knows she’s still up. He’s been relying on her more and more recently, has been _talking_ to her more and he’s not sure what that means. He thinks she might be his friend.

“That’s what she said,” Grant tells her. He knows that’s not what she’s asking about. She’s asking if he’s sure he wants to do this, if he’s ready to confront the company that made the strings they let _John Garrett_ pull. He doesn’t answer because that’s not how they operate, because it’s none of her business. Because he’s _not_ sure and he can’t bring himself to tell her that. “Can you look up employees, find someone I can follow? An easy target.”

“Yeah,” Daisy says with a sigh and Grant wonders why she’s still surprised that the conversation wasn’t going the way that she wanted it to, “I can do that.” _Clack clack clack clack_.

“How’s Phil?” Grant asks, abruptly changes the subject.

“Phil drinks. Phil goes to work and drinks. Phil goes home and… you wanna take a wild guess what he does there?”

“He drinks?” Grant decides to humor her. Just this time.

“Bingo,” Daisy says. “Got it in one.” _Clack clack_. “So. Uh. What do you think about her?”

“About who?”

“This Simmons chick,” Daisy says with a tone like she couldn’t believe she had to spell that out. Grant sighs, drums his fingers on the steering wheel. He hadn’t even gone back to the warehouse before he had typed out her number (he’s used that warehouse for a year and a half now, has made no indication that he planned on leaving it and yet he couldn’t bring himself to actually call it _home_ ). What _did_ he think? An image flashes before his eyes, her sitting across from him, stirring nothing into her coffee, fingers tucking loose hair behind her ear.

“I don’t know,” he says. “Smart. Scared.”

“Pretty?”

“I’m hanging up,” Grant says, hears her say _wait_ but ends the call, just like he said he would.

 

— — — —

 

He can’t sit still. He wants to strap on his gear, load out and just get it over with, storm the building in the dead of night when there might be two or three less people than there were at lunchtime and keep asking for Fitz until someone handed him over. Sure, HYDRA was formulating who the hell knew what, but he also knew enough about them to know that the facility in the city that Fitz was more likely being stored at wasn’t where they kept the finished projects, wasn’t where they did any serious testing. Just like the closest SHIELD, this place was just for design and blueprints. Development.

Which also meant that most of the people there would be like Jemma, just shadow versions of her instead. Maybe they didn’t deserve to die. They might not even know what was going on, told that Fitz was a new team member, welcome him aboard and don’t mind if he starts saying strange things about being there against his will. For all Grant knew, most of those people could be in the exact same boat, they just didn’t have someone like Jemma who’d find someone like _Grant_ to get them out. Or they did but they hadn’t been successful.

He can’t sit still, which means he can’t sleep, which means he can’t _shut his brain off_ , as much as he possibly can anymore. It would have been so easy for him to become Phil and the only reason that he didn’t was that his need for revenge superseded his self-pity. But what would become of him when he’d gotten what he wanted? There were those boxes again, the ones he’s terrified of putting a boxcutter to and slitting the tape to unpack what was inside.

So there he is instead, pacing, pacing like he does when he can’t do anything else, when his guns are all clean and if he went at them with a cloth again he may wipe them out of existence, ignoring the feeling in his arms and chest that are telling him there’s something he _could_ do but he won’t succumb to it because doing that just to relieve tension, just to _do it_ , wasn’t who he was. He’s pacing and the sun is just barely starting to come up, the voice is being surprisingly quiet again and that’s when his phone rings.

For a second, while he closes the gap between himself and the table, he’s worried that it’s going to be Jemma, that she’s been hurt and he hadn’t done anything to prevent it. She was being targeted for something she made, something she was probably carrying around with her, and the way she spoke about it implied that a couple nights ago wasn’t the first time someone had tried to physically remove it from her person. He should have stayed with her, parked his van out in front of her building at the very least and threatened anyone who tried to get him towed away, not just given her his number because dead women can’t make phone calls.

Instead, he sees the word ‘Skye’ on the screen, the pseudonym that Daisy used online, the one that she had told Grant he didn’t have to call her, which should have been Grant’s first indication that she wasn’t just some girl who helped him every now and then anymore. She was good and she was fast but this was HYDRA, not some two-bit criminal who used the word ‘password’ for all his locked accounts.

“Already?” He asks, tries not to sound skeptical and she lets out a noise he couldn’t interpret.

“Not yet. It’s… well. Something bad is going on with Phil.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, I’ve been spying on him through his webcam,” she says, “And I just watched some man dressed in black come marching in, grab Phil and drag him out of frame. I almost thought it was you for a hot minute. I don’t even know why he was _there_ this early. Pretty sure he never went home.” Grant had already started pulling his jacket on by the time Daisy had said the words ‘man dressed in black’, and he’s tucking his pistol into his holster when he asks:

“What else happened?”

“Don’t know. The guy must have destroyed the laptop. Or closed it. I can’t see anything anymore.” Grant knows he has the guy’s card somewhere, had put it down once he’d gotten back to the warehouse but there’s no way in hell that he’ll be able to find it now, tells Daisy to give him the address and then he’s out the door.

 

— — — —

 

Even as he’s nearly there, Grant knows there’s no way he’d be making it to Phil’s office in time to make a difference. If the person who got their hands on him was who Grant thought it was, was someone who he _used_ to be, then he was going to be walking into the tail end of a bloodbath or a room that was almost impossibly clean. Either way, Phil would be gone and no use to anyone anymore. Garrett knew that Grant had spoken to Phil. He never planned on following up on that favor and that conversation had just been some convoluted sort of game that only _he_ knew the rules to. It didn’t matter which one, Phil was dead either way and Garrett was very likely responsible.

He hurries all the same, ignores the people trying to ask if they can help him because he knows they can’t, takes the stairs two at a time and there, at the end of the hall on the sixth floor is a door with frosted glass, scratched gold lettering that was _supposed_ to say ‘Philip Goff, Esquire, Attorney” but instead said ‘Philip _Goof_ ’ and Grant wonders equally how low this man’s self-esteem must be that he never had it fixed and why in the world someone like Garrett would hire someone like that for whatever he felt like he needed a lawyer for. But maybe that was the point.

Grant opens the door without thinking because he expected nothing, which is why he is momentarily stunned to see that there actually _was_ someone in there and it was someone he knew.

“Ollie,” he says, watches the man in gear that nearly perfectly matched his own look up from the desk he was searching through, like he’d been directed here to dispose of Phil (which he had, Grant notices, glances at the body on the floor, dark blood making a perverse halo under his head) but had also been told, if possible, to take the time and sort through this mess. He could have been looking for something specific or Garrett could have been playing a joke on him. It was hard to tell sometimes.

There’s one, two seconds of recognition, of confusion and something else that flickers in Ollie’s dead eyes, and Grant hears him say, softly, puzzled: “Grant?” but then something kicks in—the _programming_ as _he_ had called it, _brainwashing_ as Grant had learned it to be—and he’s slamming his palms on the top of the desk, launching himself over it and Grant steels himself for the first blow. It comes to his shoulder, like there’s a part of Ollie that’s remembering that, once upon a time, Grant had injured it badly enough that it was a spot he could be disabled by if hit _just right_ but it had healed since then and there’s a look on Ollie’s face after he realizes that it didn’t work, as if there was some wiring somewhere in his head that was momentarily shorting out.

Grant goes for his sidearm but Ollie notices, grabs Grant’s wrist, uses that distraction to nail him across the jaw and the gun is there and then it isn’t but, surprisingly, Ollie isn’t using it on him, tosses it instead and Grant listens as it bounces, skitters across the wooden floor. Guns were easier but hand-to-hand was quieter; it was the first thing they learned and one of the only things from that time that wasn’t just a haze of muddled instructions and training that came more as whispers in the middle of the night or pure instinct.

What ensues over the next few minutes is a full-on brawl and the only reason Grant can think as to why the police hadn’t been called yet is because they were the only ones on this floor. Bruised, bloody, panting, they circle each other, neither ready to give up or go down, and Grant takes his eyes away from Ollie for just long enough to try and find _something_ he could use to end this that didn’t involve shooting him because he knew the second his fingertips brushed the handle of his pistol, Ollie would have his out, too, and Grant was confident in his abilities but—at this particular moment—not enough to believe he’d be fast enough.

 _Clack, clack, clack_ , the voice says and, at first, Grant thinks it’s just making noise to make noise but then he gets it.

He picks up the laptop in two hands and Ollie tries to do the same, to take it from him because he may be a marionette but he wasn’t _stupid_ but Grant lifts a leg, slams the bottom of his foot into Ollie’s stomach, pushes him back and kicks the wind from him. Grant follows him, holds his arms up and delivers a full-force blow to the side of his head. Remarkably, Ollie doesn’t collapse despite how hard Grant had hit but he staggers, sways slightly and turns his head to stare at Grant who immediately recognizes the face he was gazing at: it was the same one he saw on himself when he had his moment of clarity, when something inside his head dislodged.

“Ollie,” Grant repeats, speaks around the flecks of blood in his mouth, says it a third time and Ollie cocks his head to the side, blinks.

“What—” He starts to say but then he pulls his gaze away from Grant’s face, sees the computer still clutched in his knuckle-scraped hands, connects it to the pain he’s feeling and whatever chain in there that Grant had loosened tightens again. Ollie goes for the knife strapped to his thigh but Grant takes another swing before he can do anything, hears a _crack_ as it connects with the side of his face and gives him one more, just in case, watches him crumple to the floor, groaning.

Grant discards the laptop, flings it because he doesn’t need it anymore. He takes a minute, chest heaving as he tries to catch his breath, calm himself down, get his heart rate back down to normal or, at least, to a point where he’s not hearing it thudding in his ears. He runs his tongue over his teeth, checks to make sure that they’re all there, puts a hand to the stab wound he had stitched up only a couple days ago and it’s sore, but the thread hadn’t pulled apart. Everything else was tolerable, barely worth prodding at. He’s had worse and he’ll have worse again.

He looks to Phil but he knows there’s nothing he could do for him. Not right now. He had to get out of here because his luck would run out eventually, men in one uniform or another would show up, a client would walk in at the wrong moment or the man who sent Ollie would call in and then get paranoid when he doesn’t answer. None of it was good and none of it was worth waiting around for. There’s a fire escape outside the window behind the desk and he’s got one leg through when he hesitates, the voice in his head singing to him.

_Who am I supposed to be? Not exactly sure anymore. Where's this going to? Can I follow through?_

_Or just follow you for a while?_

This is the first time it’s not just using music to torment him, to make fun of him, and he’s not sure what exactly to make of that.

It’s only the concussion that most likely stops Ollie from fighting him when Grant helps him off the floor, puts his arm around his shoulders, starts walking him towards the open window. He tries to say something to him but it comes out as muddled, inarticulate, the only noises a man with a broken jaw could make.

“Yeah,” Grant says, their boots clanging against metal, “I know.”

He gets Ollie into the passenger seat, clicks the seatbelt over him and waits until he’s a couple blocks away from the building, until they’re at a red light, to take out his phone. Grant thinks about calling her but decides to text instead, his unusually shaking fingers tapping out a message, telling her to contact the police, send them to Phil’s office. It buzzes with a reply.

‘Sure thing’, it reads and he can feel her uncertainness radiating from the screen. ‘He’s dead, isn’t he?’

‘Yes’, he types, because there’s no point in lying to her. She doesn’t say anything else but he figures she’s busy, doing what he’d asked. His shoulders are tense and he glances towards the seat next to him, a part of him still waiting for Ollie to attack again but he’s got his head pressed against the glass, is staring out at the city, looking completely and utterly bewildered as blood and saliva drip slowly onto his dark shirt.

 

— — — —

 

The nurses who greet him at the sliding glass doors seem to know exactly who he is, take Ollie from him with surprising care and it doesn’t hit Grant as to why until much later; the only people he directs to a hospital, brings _in person_ , were victims of a crime he’s just dragged them free from the claws of, out of quite possibly the darkest moment in their lives.

In a way, Grant thinks, that’s exactly what had happened.

He had no idea if what he had done even mattered in the end. Ollie would probably be found and collected. Reconditioned. Grant has vague memories of people he had trained alongside, had _done things_ with, being there one day, gone the next. He’d never asked questions (or, at least, he _thought_ he hadn’t; there was still so much about then that he doesn’t remember). He feels something clench tight in his gut, blames it on hunger. It’s been awhile since he’s had something to eat.

 

— — — —

 

There’s someone waiting by the door to his warehouse and he hesitates, cautious, until he sees who it is.

“What happened?” He asks because this, meeting face-to-face, actually _seeing_ each other, breathing the same air, was uncommon. They had an unspoken arrangement. He hadn’t even told her where he lived but, out of everyone he knew or ever met, Grant guesses that she would have to be one of the few who’d be able to find out.

“What happened is that I’m pretty sure I just watched a man _die_ through a webcam which you’d think would make it somehow less personal but it didn’t.” She’s rambling, which isn’t exactly new. “I am _not_ okay. And you’re the only one in my life who would possibly understand. How messed up is that?”

“You could have called,” Grant says, unlocks the door, opens it, but stands in the doorway, blocking it because he wasn’t entirely sure he wanted her to follow him inside, isn’t sure he’s ready to take their apparent friendship to that level yet. “You’ve found people for me before. People who’ve wound up dead.”

“Yeah,” Daisy says, “Thanks for the reminder.” She sighs, shrugs. “I never had to _see it_.” It’s easy to put what you’re doing in the back of your mind when you don’t have to watch it happen. Like that well known question: for a million dollars, would you push a button to kill a stranger on the other side of the world? Some would say that Daisy was doing exactly that, except she wasn’t getting paid.

(“Why are you helping me?” Grant had asked once.

“Because you asked me to,” Daisy had said, when she still insisted he call her Skye. “And I may not love your methods, but I’m a fan of what you’re doing.”)

“Anyway,” she says, “I should be asking _you_ what happened. You look pretty messed up.”

“It’s nothing,” he tells her, because that’s what it was. “I took care of it.” There are things she knows about his past and things she didn’t—she knows that John Garrett was someone who had done something bad to him, something he didn’t like to talk about, something he was still trying to fix but what that thing was _exactly_ was one of the many things she didn’t. “Do me a favor?”

“Sure,” Daisy says, without hesitation and Grant frowns. This was probably a mistake.

“There’s a man at Saint Michael’s. Oliver Hahn. Can you keep an eye on him?”

“I can try,” Daisy says. “I feel kind of hinky about hacking a hospital, though. I don’t want to put too many fingers in too many high-profile pies, you know? I’m already balls-deep in trying to get into all the arms of HYDRA. I’m skilled but it’s only a matter of time until they kick me out and I have to start over.”

“Nevermind,” Grant says, goes to walk inside but stops when a hand drops onto his arm and he looks back. Daisy pulls away quickly, like he’s a hot stove she could only touch for a few seconds before she got burned.

“I said I would try. Oh,” she says suddenly, jumping slightly with the word, “Speaking of HYDRA…” Daisy starts digging in the bag slung over her shoulder, pulls out a folded piece of printer paper, hands it to him. “Here’s that list of employees you wanted. I circled the ones I think would work best. The real…” She blows a raspberry, gives a thumbs-down. “Strangely easy to find, which seems kind of… eh. Weird. I’m not sure what you’re going to get out of this but that’s not my area of expertise. And I don’t remember you ever asking for blueprints for the facility but I’m working on that.” A small smile. “I have no how you did any of this before you found me.”

 _Me neither_ , Grant thinks, thanks her, and then slams the door in her face.

 

— — — —

 

He’s only just unfolded the piece of paper that Daisy had given him, has barely eaten half of a granola bar that he found next to the sink when he gets a call and he answers without looking at who it is.

“Any progress?” Jemma asks and Grant holds the phone away from his ear, furrows his brow at it before letting out an exhale and putting it back.

“It’s only been four hours.”

“I know,” Jemma says, sounds apologetic. “But I’m finding I’m not very good at sitting on my hands. I have to go into work in an hour and I was hoping you’d at least have _something_ to tell me.”

“You’re going to work?”

“I thought about calling in sick but I was worried that would be too suspicious. Besides, I need to occupy myself, keep my mind busy with something else.” A brief moment of silence. “I don’t want them to see me hiding because then they’ll believe they’re wearing me down, they’re _getting to me_ and they are but…”

“You don’t want them to know that,” Grant finishes for her. He understands. Putting on a brave face for your enemy was one of the worst things you can do to them. They _want_ you to be scared and if they can see that you’re not? It makes them question whether or not they have a chance at winning. Grant wonders who taught her that or if it was just something that she _knew_.

“That man…” She starts after a lengthy pause. “Do you know what happened to him?”

“No,” Grant says, takes a chance on assuming what her concerns were: “If the police haven’t turned up on your doorstep yet, they won’t.”

“Okay.” She doesn’t sound like she believes him but appreciates the attempt anyway. “Well. Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For talking to me. You could have hung up as soon as I asked. I wouldn’t have blamed you.”

“It’s fine.” He doesn’t know what else to say and, apparently, neither does she. The hang up is stilted, awkward and Grant flattens the paper with a swipe of his palm, stares hard at the names. Daisy had said that she had no idea what he wanted them for but he did; making it work was something else entirely. It involved aggression and intimidation—two things he knew he was good at—with a dash of his reputation, which he’d spent a year and a half swiftly chiseling out of cold marble.

The main problem was going to be in choosing the right person because, he picks the wrong name, they could run to their bosses, tell them that Grant Ward was coming and everything would crumble before it even truly got started.

Grant stares at the list of names and thinks.

 

— — — —

 

He chooses Ralph Wilkerson.

If anyone were to ask him why, he was sure he’d be able to scrounge around a believable reason but the truth was that he had pretty much closed his eyes and let his finger fall where it wanted. Despite his misgivings, the worry about getting it wrong, he realizes that agonizing over it for longer than he needed to would have him winding up too stuck in his head, over-thinking and, besides, a name like that brought up the visual of a schlubby, lower-level guy or, as Daisy had described it: _thbbbbt_.

There’s no real reason for him to go to Ralph’s apartment now—he’s at work and Grant needs him _there_ to get done what he needs to get done—but with his new lead newly dead (he was keeping an eye on the news, knows it’s only been a couple hours, but he hadn’t been especially stealthy about entering the building and if he wasn’t going to be outright blamed, he’d definitely be a suspect; he has to hope that at least he could get this job done before he’s finally tracked down), and no significant criminals causing major problems that he has sitting on the back burner, none that require immediate attention, he doesn’t have anything else to do.

Dime-a-dozen, just like every other building he’s seen before and he walks back and forth for a few minutes, feet scuffing on the sidewalk, stares at the front door and bites the inside of his mouth and then stops, stands in the shadow of the concrete steps and closes his eyes, runs through his strategy:

Wait for him to come home, grab him, have a talk, work it out. The easiest way would be for Ralph to smuggle Grant in, hidden in the trunk of his car, but the likelihood of him even _having_ one was pretty slim and walking him in through the front door and expecting nobody to know who he was or what was going on was even slimmer. This would be so much more uncomplicated if Fitz was being held in a stash house or someone’s basement.

He runs the fingernail on his index finger along the cuticle of his thumb.

He could flush him out, get the building evacuated, a scramble of people and alarms, and pick him up like that, but there was no guarantee that the higher ups—whoever was holding a leash and an eye on Fritz—wouldn’t figure out it had been done on purpose and keep him locked up or, worst case, kill him because he wasn’t worth the trouble.

Grant’s fingers itch and his phone feels suddenly heavy in his pocket. He should call Jemma, tell her that this was a mistake, that if Fitz had been taken by the mob or petty criminals who he owed money to, he could do that, but HYDRA, all on his own… He should call. She wouldn’t forgive him for it, but it might be the right thing to do.

 _Smart cookie_ , the voice says. _Sweet_.

He goes back to his van and decides to wait for Ralph to come home.

 

— — — —

 

Morning turns into afternoon, afternoon into early evening. He drinks more coffee than he probably should but he hasn’t slept in what felt like days. He didn’t _have_ to keep himself awake but he was worried that if he closed his eyes, even for half a second, he may pass out for longer than he needed to and wake up tomorrow or the day after that disoriented and his plan sinking through his fingers like water.

He keeps his eyes open and he waits, ignores the pains in his stomach, quells them with more coffee and keeps waiting. Light fades and he checks the clock on the dashboard, rubs a hand over his face, through his dark hair. Just another hour or maybe two and then he could do what he was good at, what he was good at _now_ , had been _made_ to be good at because he could unlearn certain things but not everything and not all at once.

(Maybe he didn’t _want_ to unlearn it all because then, well… who would he be? A shell just the same, but one without a purpose and without any skills.)

One or two more hours possibly and then he could— His phone rings.

“I don’t mean to… I just…” A deep, steadying breath. “Someone’s been in my apartment. Or might still be in there.”

“How do you know?” Grant asks, keeps his gaze directed out the windshield.

“The door was open,” Jemma says. “I didn’t even check. I left, went straight to the diner. The one we met in last night.” She’s not asking what she wants to ask but Grant doesn’t need her to because she’s telling him exactly where she is, which was enough for him to work it out: she wants him to come find her, to go with her to her apartment, to make sure she wasn’t walking straight into the barrel of a gun, a trap, or the emotionally devastating feeling of _knowing_ that a stranger had been in your home, going through your things. But if he leaves now, this entire day would have been a waste, he’d have to start all over again tomorrow and he’s not entirely sure he could do this a second time.

If Grant believed that sort of thing, he’d think this was a sign from the universe or some other-worldly being that this was the wrong tract to take, this wasn’t the best plan and being pulled away from it was a way of saying _try something else_. He clenches his jaw, watches as Ralph starts to make his way toward his building, earlier that Grant was expecting, soles of his shoes scuffing along as he drags them, bald head shining under a street lamp.

“I’ll be right there,” Grant says, and starts the engine.

 

— — — —

 

Jemma hadn’t been wrong: the door was open. Not all the way, just a crack, enough for someone who was used to seeing it _not_ that way upon coming home to know that something was definitely wrong and Grant can feel Jemma moving, coming up to stand closer but he puts out an arm, directs her behind him. He takes in a breath, holds it and tries to look through the space because if there _was_ anyone in there he didn’t want to risk them hearing him _breathe_ if he didn’t have to but he can’t see much of anything and so he turns his head away, lets the breath out slowly and then glances back at Jemma. A finger to his lips and then a hand, flat out, in front of her face. She nods, just once.

The door doesn’t creak, barely makes a noise when he pushes it open with the tips of his fingers and he edges in slowly, has a hand on his holster but doesn’t pull out his gun (not yet, but he’d have no qualms about it if he had to) and stops after just a couple steps. The apartment is small but neatly put together, dark colors and straight lines. On the kitchen table, the edges curved and chipped, is a vase overturned, water spread across the surface, dripping on the wood floor, the pink and yellow flowers stretched out on their side but, other than that, Grant wouldn’t know if anything else was unusual or out-of-place.

He goes through the other rooms anyway, just in case, checks under the bed, the closest, in the shower until there’s nowhere else to look that someone of average stature could hide and then makes his way back to the doorway.

“It’s okay,” he says, steps aside to let her pass and she hesitates before nodding again and walking inside. She peers around, almost as intently as he had, before her gaze settles on the table.

Disappointed, with a slight _tsk_ , she drops her satchel on the floor, goes to the table and rights the vase, collects the flowers, dropping them into the opening and then abandons them for a moment to go into her kitchen, rummages in a drawer and comes back around the counter with a dishtowel in her hands. While this goes on, Grant watches until he realizes that he doesn’t _have to_. He had done what he’d come here to do and now he could leave, which is exactly what he starts doing, but then he hears:

“Wait.” She seemed to do that a lot, tell him to wait, to _stop_ , and, remarkably, each time he does.

_She’s brainwashing you. You’re susceptible. She’s got you. Right in her grip. Grip. Hands. Tight. Your circuit's dead, there's something wrong._

That Grant knows is a lie (because sometimes, rarely, the voice does that, too) but it doesn’t stop his palms from sweating and the ringing to start in his ears.

“Could you…” Jemma trails off, looks down at the now-damp towel in her hands before looking back up at Grant. “Could you stay? Just for the rest of the night. You keep assuring me that whoever does this _can’t_ come back or _won’t_ but you… Well, you very well can’t know that for certain this time.” The way that she’s gazing at him—the downturn of her mouth, her tense shoulders—is why he tries not to get too involved when he’s asked to do something like this; he wasn’t _emotions_. He was a nothing that knew how to pull a trigger and didn’t feel the emptiness ending a life can give you, because there wasn’t anything left inside to take. Friends for a husk like him were bad news. (Daisy had been an anomaly.)

He hates, though, that she’s right. This may have just been done to scare her or the person who had come here—most likely looking for whatever Jemma had created in hopes that she had simply chosen to leave it in a drawer somewhere—would figure it was worth trying again once she was home and it would be easier just to be here than have to drive all the way back and maybe not make it in time, just like with Phil. It didn’t solve any problems for tomorrow night, but he supposes it would sort things out enough for now. The chair at the table she had just finished cleaning wobbles when he sits and he turns away from her gratitude.

 

— — — —

 

_For here am I sitting in a tin can, far above the world. Planet Earth is blue and there's nothing I can do…_

The voice is singing again but then Grant becomes aware that it sounds too much like David Bowie, lifts his head from where it had been resting in the crook of his arm. He hadn’t meant to doze off, doesn’t know how he had let it happen and he feels like a fist was folding around his heart, blood rushing in his ears. The music is coming from a small speaker sitting on the slightly raised surface of the counter a couple feet away from him, the one that Jemma is standing behind, doing something inconsequential, and he stands, strides over to her. His hand is closing over the device before he can even really think about what he was doing and he throws it, slams it down hard on the floor, and Jemma yelps as it shatters into plastic pieces, the song coming to an abrupt stop.

There’s a ringing silence between them for what felt like too long after, a look of pure shock pulled across Jemma’s face as Grant tries to control his breathing and slowly, the rest of the world comes back to him.

“Why were you playing that?” He asks through gritted teeth.

“Y—You were humming it in your sleep,” Jemma says, stammering slightly, “I thought I would put it on.” He expects her to tell him to get out, either angrily or fearfully but instead, despite the nervous flush to her cheeks, her face softens. “I’m sorry. Bad memory?” He doesn’t concede that she’s right, but he doesn’t disagree either, crouches down and starts cleaning up the mess he made. He doesn’t understand why she’s not more distressed by what had just happened. Maybe she figures that someone like him must have some demons and that was the price she had to pay to get his help. It couldn’t be because she _cared_. They hardly knew each other. “Maybe this isn’t the best time to ask,” she starts to say once he rises back to his full height, speaker pieces in his hands and she holds out her own, waits for him to dump them into her palms before continuing. “But Fitz. HYDRA…”

“I’m working on it,” Grant says. His head still feels out of shape, slightly warped. It’s probably a good thing that she’s talking to him because he’s not sure where else he’d let himself go if there was quiet there, if she had made him leave. He hadn’t anticipated that particular reaction from himself; the voice harassed him with it nearly every day but actually hearing it outside of his own head had sent a whammy up his spine, through the back of his neck. There was a ghostly finger hovering over a switch and he’d just barely managed to knock it away. “I’m finding a way to get in.”

“I could get you in,” Jemma says and Grant blinks at her, purses his lips. “That’s the point of taking Fitz, isn’t it? To get me to give up. To show up on their doorstep, as it were, device in hand, asking for a trade.”

“No,” Grant says, probably too quickly and it’s Jemma’s turn to frown. She walks around the counter, plants herself in front of Grant and crosses her arms, but still uses a hand to gesture as she talks.

“Wouldn’t it be far less suspicious than _whatever else_ you may have been cooking up? I drive up, say I have it, they win, here you go. I’ll… I’ll refuse to give it to them then and there. I _have_ to do it inside the building. You’ll—”

“No,” Grant says again, points a finger in her face. He’s willing to put the neck of a random employee on the line, it didn’t matter what would happen to him if the higher-ups found out that he had lead the fox right into their hen house but there was only one of him. There was nothing he could do to help her once they’ve brought her inside and she certainly didn’t seem like the type capable of expert stalling. He couldn’t keep her from harm and look for Fitz at the same time and he’d never forgive himself if he managed to get her friend from whatever bottom floor he’s being stored on to find that Jemma had her throat slit while he was kicking down doors.

“I can take care of myself,” Jemma says.

“So that’s why—” Grant begins to say but is abnormally noisy vibrating of his phone. Depending on who you asked, the device had done him a favor, had stopped him from saying something ill-advised and he exhales through his nose, finds his phone in his jacket pocket and puts it up to his ear. “What?”

“Whoa,” Daisy says as soon as she hears him, “You okay?”

“What is it?”

“I’ll take that as a ‘no’,” Daisy says. “Couple of things: One: I found those blueprints. They’re five years old and who the hell knows what HYDRA may have changed but it’s the best we’ll get. I’ve emailed them to you. Second: that Oliver Hahn guy you asked me to keep an eye on? Yeah, well, he’s gone.” Grant considers that for a second.

“What do you mean he’s ‘gone’?” That word in the human language tended to have multiple meanings. ‘Gone’ as in: he was taken away. ‘Gone’ as in: he’d left. ‘Gone’ as in: he’s dead.

“Gone. He knocked out a nurse, stumbled out of his room in a panic, took down two security guards and ran.” Grant puts a hand over his mouth, pulls at it, sighs into his fingers. He doesn’t know why Garrett hadn’t come to collect one of his soldiers—why he let him stew in a hospital—but the word ‘panic’ was what was really sticking out to him, like the only letter still lit on a neon sign. If he was still under control, his escape would have been calm. He would have snapped the nurse’s neck, stolen the gun from one of the guards and walked himself out the front door and he knows that Daisy hadn’t been exaggerating for effect when she relayed what had happened.

Grant isn’t sure if the hit to the head is what had changed things or if just seeing him again altered something but there definitely seemed to be a shift. How long it would last was another question entirely.

“How long ago did this happen?”

“Eh… twenty-five minutes give or take.” A pause. “He could be anywhere.” How did she know what he was thinking?

“Yeah.”

“I can monitor the police band in the area. Maybe get into some traffic cams but I don’t even know what he looks like…”

“It’s okay,” Grant says, puts a hand in his pocket and rubs his thumb over the bumps of his car keys. When he had first broken through, when he had come back to himself for longer than a few minutes, he’d ran, too, but he hadn’t gotten very far because at some point he realized he had no idea where he was and no clue where to go. It was easier to find somewhere, hunker down, figure things out. He’d wound up sitting in the woods outside of a facility he and his group had been assaulting for three days without food or water, simply staring into space until he’d finally decided that wasn’t going to fix anything, it wasn’t going to remold his brain back to its normal shape.

He has no reason to assume that Ollie would do the same thing but, for Grant, it had seemed like the appropriate response at the time and he has to hope that Ollie was exactly like the terrified animal that Grant had once been.

He doesn’t remember hanging up on Daisy but he must have because the phone was suddenly off and away from his face. He shoves it back where he had found it, starts making his way to the door.

“I’ll be right back,” he tells Jemma, can’t believe he’s not considering using this as an excuse to abandon her until he’s finished the job or at least watch her from a distance because this, this _closeness_ , was too much.

“No,” Jemma says, reiterating what he’d said to her only moments before, and she’s already collecting her bag. “Wherever you’re going, I’m coming with you.”

“I don’t need you hanging around. This is—” _It’s personal_ , is what he wants to say. “This isn’t your business.”

“I’m not staying here alone. And maybe I could help.”

“I don’t need your help,” Grant says.

“So you’ve made perfectly clear,” Jemma says, walks over to where he’s standing. “I won’t get in the way, I promise.” Grant has a feeling that the only way he’ll be able to stop her would be with physical force but the thought of pushing her around in any sort of capacity that might leave bruises behind (even accidentally) leaves a bad taste in the back of this throat.

“You sit in the van, you don’t leave it no matter what. You don’t say a _word_.” She gives him a very small smile. “Stop that.” She does not.

 

— — — —

 

He starts at Saint Michael’s.

He doesn’t go inside because there’s no point, he’s already heard what happened from Daisy and any details from that weren’t going to help and instead parks the van as close to the ambulance bay that he could get without having someone knock on his window and ask what he thinks he’s doing. He studies the buildings, the street with its potholes and loose gravel, the uneven sidewalks, a sickly tree stuck in a square of soil boxed in by a low, metal fence.

If he was a scared man who was starting to untangle years of conditioning, who had a dimmer switch in his head starting to turn the bulb from dark to faded, where would he go?

_Make sure that I never come back. Disappear and I never come back. Make sure that I never come back. Disappear and I never come back. Make—_

“Shut up,” Grant says, doesn’t realize it’s out loud until he hears Jemma reply:

“I didn’t say anything.” Instead of coming up with a semi-plausible reason (‘I could tell you were about to’, ‘you’re thinking too loudly’) or telling her the truth—saying that even if she _had_ spoken, he wouldn’t have shut her down that way—he says nothing at all. “May I ask you one question?” Grant flickers his gaze sidelong at her, grunts, which she takes as a ‘yes’. “What are you doing?”

“I’m looking for someone.” He points to the hospital. “They left there about…” A glance to the clock on the dash. “Thirty-five minutes ago.”

“Couldn’t you just ask the people inside where he went?”

“That was more than one question,” Grant says but then he looks at her again, sighs. “Let’s just say he left AMA.” ‘Against Medical Advice’ was the _nice_ way of putting it. Wasn’t exactly the _inaccurate_ way of putting it, though.

“Oh,” Jemma says. “I see.” The phone he had dropped in a cup holder when he’d climbed into the van starts to let him know that it’d really like to talk to him and he fumbles with it as he picks it up, narrows his eyes at the screen.

‘Man in hospital clothes. Disoriented. Spotted in WW Park. 5 mins from hospital.’

‘Thanks’ Grant taps back to her.

‘Don’t thank me, thank the tourists’ Daisy writes in response. Only tourists would waste their time calling in something like that to the police, which also explains why they most likely hadn’t shown up to sort him out yet. Just another city weirdo but it might be the city weirdo that Grant was looking for.

 

— — — —

 

“Stay—”

“—In the van,” Jemma finishes for him, speaks to him from the passenger-side window. Grant had found a spot a block away from the park which wasn’t ideal, especially if he needed to drag Ollie there, but it was the closest he could get without parking illegally and drawing more attention to themselves. There was a taser in the glove compartment which he had Jemma get for him and she had put it cautiously in his hands, looked disgruntled, like she couldn’t understand why he’d need something like that for a person who was most likely already suffering. (A man checking himself out ‘against medical advice’ meant that he was in no condition to be going _anywhere_ outside the white walls of a hospital.) Grant didn’t want to have to use it either, but it was the best he could do if Ollie wanted to fight without exacerbating his injuries (or giving him new ones).

The park is poorly lit and Grant wonders how _anybody_ had managed to see someone in here and see them well enough to be concerned. His instinct is to walk carefully, keep his feet silent, but sneaking up on someone who’s probably already on the defensive wasn’t going to get Ollie to trust him any time soon, so he does the exact _opposite_ of what he’d been trained to do.

“Ollie,” he calls out, walks with heavy footsteps along the stone path that looped through the bushes and trimmed trees with thick trunks. “Ollie, it’s Grant.” He stops by a sign, just on the outskirts of the central, open area, _Walter Williams Park, Est. 2012_ etched into the wood, and listens. His mouth is open, ready to try again, when there’s a rustle from a bush two feet away and he knows it’s not because of the wind. It could be homeless, nervous by the tone of his voice, ready to tell him to _shut up_ because they’re trying to sleep, but then a head with somehow still impossibly neat dirty-blonde hair rises from the green that looked black in the shadows cast by the trees, and a pair of wide, green eyes meet his. “Ollie.”

Ollie stands slowly, his arms outstretched slightly, back hunched, like he’s getting ready to run. He tries to say something but it comes out muffled, like his teeth had been glued together but, Grant realizes, in a way, they had been: Grant had broken his jaw and the doctors had wired it shut. Grant unintentionally mimics his stance, except he turns his palms up, opens his fingers.

“Just come with me, alright? I can explain everything.” Grant takes one step forward and Ollie moves backwards. The voice starts humming but he can’t place it, it’s too indistinct. “He messed around with your head. He did the same with me. He did it to all of us.” He should invoke his name, make it perfectly clear who he’s talking about, but he still can’t make himself say it. “You don’t have to work for him anymore.” Another step but, this time, Ollie doesn’t move away. “I can fix it.” Could he? Should he really be making those sorts of promises? He’d done it for himself but it was only because he knew himself, his own mind (at least for awhile).

He’s right in front of him now, searches his face, and Ollie does it in return, tries to talk again but it’s still just noises. Grant takes a chance, reaches out and puts a hand on his arm but Ollie’s expression hardens and he reacts poorly, attempts to fight and actually manages a decent punch in the spot just under Grant’s right ear. Grant grabs his wrists, holds him, but Ollie struggles, kicks Grant in right in the knee, buckles it, sending him to the ground. Grant keeps his grip, brings Ollie down with him. They continue to wrestle until Grant manages to get Ollie on his back, laying on top of his own body, hooks his arm around his neck, the other over his head the same way he had done with Omdahl’s bodyguard a few nights ago, holds on until Ollie stops floundering.

When he’s absolutely sure that he was passed out, Grant let’s go, pushes Ollie off of himself as gently as he could and then stands, reaches down to hoist him up into a fireman’s carry and starts walking them out of the park.

“Oh my god,” Jemma says, leaning out the window as she watches them approach.

“There are zip ties in the glove compartment,” Grant says once he’s close enough to the vehicle that he doesn’t have to shout (although they weren’t exactly inconspicuous and Grant had to hope that the people he passed by figured whatever was going on wasn’t their problem, just Ward doing what Ward does), “And then climb in the back, open the doors.” He sees her duck back inside, hears the _thud_ of her opening the drawer and shuffles over, steps back when the doors open out suddenly towards him so as not to get whacked across the face, Jemma crouched down above him, her eyes wide. Walking forward, he bends his knees slightly, lowers a shoulder and dumps Ollie into the large empty space in the back of his van before climbing in after him, slamming the doors behind them.

Jemma hands him the zip ties, observes as Grant puts Ollie’s wrists together behind his back, pulls them on tightly, sits him up against the metal wall but then changes his mind and lies him down.

“What did he do?” Jemma asks quietly, as if she were afraid to wake him.

“Nothing,” Grant says. “Nothing that was his fault.”

 

— — — —

 

He doesn’t know where else to bring him, so Grant takes him to his warehouse and it’s not until he’s parked in his usual spot that he remembers that Jemma was still there. Ollie had woken up four minutes after they hard started to drive away but had been oddly silent, had simply stayed in the position that Grant had put him in, stared at the opposite wall, unblinking. If Jemma hadn’t told him that she could see him breathing, Grant might have believed he spontaneously died.

“What now?” Jemma asks, hands folded in her lap. Grant glances at Ollie in the rearview mirror and not at her.

“I call someone I know to take you home.” He won’t leave Ollie alone in the warehouse but he won’t keep him tied up in the back of the van either while he drops Jemma off at her front steps. He’d keep him in there long enough to wait for Daisy to get here but no more than that. He sends her a text (‘Need another favor. Bring your car.’), drops it back in the cup holder while they wait.

“Are you still going to help me?” Grant’s surprised she doesn’t argue. She sounds melancholy and he’s not sure why she thinks that he wouldn’t, what he could have said or done in the past few minutes to make her question if he really still had her back on this.

“Of course,” he says, and leaves it at that. Twenty minutes later a dark red sedan pulls up behind the van, the figure inside leaning on the horn, and both Grant and Jemma hop out onto the sidewalk. He tells her to wait a moment, walks up to the driver’s side and Daisy rolls down the window, rests her elbow on the space it left behind.

“Face-to-face twice in just a few hours,” Daisy says. “This job is changing things, huh?” It was. Whether or not it was for the better was still up in the air. She bends sideways slightly, glances at Jemma, who’s doing a terrible job of looking as if she’s minding her own business. “That’s her, huh?”

“That’s her,” Grant says and Daisy raises her eyebrows. “It’s not what you think.”

“You have no idea what I was thinking. But let me guess: you need me to take her somewhere?”

“Home. Take her home. That’s all.”

“You don’t want me to stay with her or anything? Because I could. I’ve got the next couple days off.” It’s a tempting idea. Jemma wouldn’t have to be alone, she’d have someone somewhat capable watching her back, leave him room to keep an eye on Ollie and scrounge together the bits and pieces of his plan to get into HYDRA on his own (or thereabouts).

“Sure,” he says, taps the roof of her car with his open hand and then straightens, walks over to Jemma and points at the car. “She’ll get you to your apartment.” He figures he’ll leave the introductions and everything else that came with it up to Daisy. Jemma nods, puts a hand on his arm and he watches her get into Daisy’s car, watches as Daisy says something to her and Jemma smiles nervously. He waits for them to leave before going to the back of his van, opening the doors and staring at Ollie, who turns his head to stare at him in return.

 

— — — —

 

There’s a cot that Grant rarely uses and he sits Ollie down on it, cuts off the zip ties and—after giving him a change of clothes which he calmly puts on—he replaces the ties with handcuffs, slaps one end around Ollie’s right wrist, the other to a pipe low enough on the wall that it wouldn’t aggravate his shoulder too much and he could still lie down if he needed to. Grant isn’t sure how to feel about how quietly and compliantly Ollie was suddenly being, if it meant that he had thought about what was going on and accepted it, or if he was biding his time, planning something.

“You must be in a lot of pain. Whatever they gave you is probably wearing off,” Grant says, fills a mostly-clean cup with water, finds a thin, hollow red stirring stick that had come with a coffee ages ago that could be used as a straw and brings it to Ollie, holds it out to him and he slowly accepts it but doesn’t drink from it. He didn’t have any painkillers strong enough to deal with what Ollie was sitting with right now and, even if he did, he wouldn’t know how to give them to him. “He won’t be able to find you here.” Grant didn’t know that for sure. He’d spent months waiting for Garrett to knock on his door, to come back and collect him, but he’d never shown and Grant hadn’t been able to figure out why. An acceptable loss, maybe. There would always be more people like him, like Ollie, to be put in the holes that were left behind.

Ollie’s still just staring at him, barely moving, and Grant doesn’t even know _which_ Ollie he was talking to. The one still under that man’s thumb or the one who was slipping free of it and had gone from terror to nearly catatonic. It was, Grant thinks, most likely the latter.

“The funny thing I found out about the cages he puts our heads in,” Grant tells him, “Is that the bars are actually made of paper. He just made sure we couldn’t ever see it.” It was a spiderweb meticulously and beautifully constructed but all it took was the swipe of a hand to completely destroy it. All you had to do was find a hand that was willing. “It’s what comes after that that really gets to you.” The clouded memories that would never clear, processing what you’ve done, the missing time. The things you hadn’t even realized were the sparks to get you in line ( _now it's time to leave the capsule, if you dare_ ). The voice he was pretty sure was just his own problem, but there wasn’t any way to be certain of that. “You’ll think you’ll want to go back but I promise you, that’s not what you really want.” When he says that, there’s a slight furrow to Ollie’s brow, like that was the first thing Grant has said since he brought him in that he’s actually _heard_ and then his hands start to tremble.

Grant takes the water from him, puts it out of the way on a small table by the head of the cot, and Ollie pulls on the handcuffs, rattling them; Grant listens as he tries to say something and shakes his head in reply. Maybe tomorrow, maybe when he was _sure_ that letting him loose wasn’t going to bring about another fight. He had no idea if Garrett had made any changes since Grant had abandoned him; that paper he mentioned could be steel now and you couldn’t knock steel down with a hand. You needed a wrecking ball and Grant didn’t have one of those.

 

— — — —

 

The blueprints are sitting in his inbox, just as Daisy said they would be, and he sits, studying them with a finger over his mouth, thumb under his chin. His head’s starting to hurt. There are too many floors and probably more than that that they didn’t include, if Grant new anything about how HYDRA operated (which, unfortunately, wasn’t all that much and he thinks back to Ralph Wilkerson, glances at his watch; _he’d_ know plenty but he was probably sleeping—Grant would either have to go now, break in and get things moving or wait until early evening again, just like he’d planned to do tonight but he wasn’t sure he was in the best headspace to get that particular balloon rolling over that bed of nails, no matter how urgent the situation).

He can hear Ollie moving around behind him and, at one point, he starts humming but it’s not a song he recognizes. Grant turns around briefly when he hears that, sees Ollie with his eyes closed as if he’s using the tune to calm himself but there’s a look on his face when he stops, when he opens his eyes, that let’s Grant know that that wasn’t what he had been doing at all: he’d been trying to turn what Garrett did back on again and it hadn’t worked.

Grant finds a station that airs nothing but classical and turns up the volume, loud enough to drown out whatever’s going on in both of their heads.

 

— — — —

 

It’s two in the afternoon.

Grant’s spent most of the time since bringing Ollie to his warehouse and now (other than taking care of said guest) coming to the conclusion that—as long as he’s loaded up with enough gear—it didn’t really matter what else happened or where he went once he actually got himself inside HYDRA’s development facility. Fire off enough rounds, make loud enough threats, and someone was bound to give you what you wanted; Grant can’t imagine that one lowly SHIELD scientist would be worth the mess Grant would make and if they were seriously that desperate for whatever Jemma had, they would back off only to try something else later, which was another fly in the ointment entirely, but one he would handle if he had to.

It’s still two in the afternoon, Grant is cleaning his shotgun when two very specific things happen, one right after the other: he realizes what’s been bugging him about this whole thing was a niggling suspicion that there’s something about this whole situation that Jemma wasn’t telling him and Daisy calls to tell him that Jemma had disappeared.

“She said she was going to work this morning but her boss just called on an actual _landline_ ,” Daisy says, like she couldn’t believe there were people out there who still had one. “I answered and he tells me in this stern voice that Jemma hadn’t shown up and he wanted to give her a chance to call in but she hadn’t and he was making sure everything was okay.” She hesitates. “You think they could have taken her?” Grant remembers a sad, softly spoken question: _Are you still going to help me?_ He’d said that he would, but he hadn’t known if she believed him or not. She’d sounded so certain when she said she’d be able to get them in the building but what good would it do any of them if she went in alone? She hadn’t given off the air of someone who would easily cave. Then again… Grant reminded himself that he barely knew her and he was still holding on to the funny feeling that there was a lot about this he didn’t know the truth of. His musings cut off by the sound of a phone ringing in the background on Daisy’s end. “It’s her landline again.”

“Answer it,” Grant tells her and he hears her putting her cell down on a table, a chair scraping along the floor, footsteps, a _hello_ and then silence as Daisy listens.

“Wait! What does—?” Daisy yells into the receiver and then quick feet, her voice in Grant’s ear.

“That was her. Was… Was Jemma. She told me to tell you not to worry, that she was happy where she was and then she hung up. What the hell does that mean?”

“It means HYDRA has her,” Grant says. They taken her or she walked right into their mouths and she’d asked to make a call because someone out there would be worrying about her and they’d allowed it, most likely on the condition that she lie and not say exactly where she was. She’d chosen to call home because it was a number she had memorized and knew that Daisy was still there, knew that Daisy knew Grant and knew also, somehow, that Grant would understand.

 _Smart cookie_ , the voice says but, instead of following with ‘sweet’ like it had twice before it says: _broken cookie._

Any appropriate or well-thought-out plans had been kicked out the window. Ralph Wilkerson wouldn’t be used for his intended purpose, but he certainly was about to have a remarkably shitty day anyway. He keeps Daisy on the line but stands up, starts getting his gear on, grabs a duffel big enough to fit a small person if he needed it to and starts loading it with whatever he could grab and he’s so focused on what’s happening that he almost forgets that Ollie is even there until he passes by the cot and feels a hand close down around his arm, stopping him. Ollie doesn’t say anything but he doesn’t have to.

“You have to stay here,” he tells him but Ollie just tightens his grip. “You’re not ready.” A grimace, a shaking of his head which turns into a nod. Grant tries to wrench free, to walk away, but Ollie won’t let him go until Grant looks at him again. He pulls on the cuffs and then holds out his free hand and Grant doesn’t get it at first but then he does, grabs it, crouches down so they were at eye level and scrutinizes him. His eyes look clear for the first time since Grant had walked in on him in Phil’s office. Paper cages. “Okay.” He’ll take backup where he can get it. He picks up the key where he’d dropped it, clicks the lock free and helps Ollie to his feet. Grant tentatively hands him a pistol, waits to see what he does, figures he could take him out if he had to but watches him put it in the waist of his borrowed pants instead. Grant directs him to an extra set of gear and goes back to where he’d left his phone. “Stay where you are,” he tells Daisy. “Do what you can from there.”

“What are you going to do?” Daisy asks him, even though he figures the answer was fairly obvious.

“I’m going to get her.” He hangs up without saying goodbye because he’s not sure he could say it in a way that wouldn’t make her think he believed he wouldn’t be coming back.

 

— — — —

 

The HYDRA building looks so nondescript that—if it didn’t have the company name and logo emblazoned, shining and black, on the front—it was the type of place that people would drive by every day, not realizing that they don’t know what’s going on in there until they bring it up casually in a discussion at the dinner table.

(“There was something weird going on at that building this afternoon while I was on my way home, Helen.”

“What do they even _do_ there, Bob?”

“You know, I honestly haven’t got a clue.”)

It’s in an area that wasn’t exactly private but it was quiet, undisturbed, and three blocks away from the subway so the employees who didn’t have a vehicle (of which there were actually very few—the only ones who didn’t were Moses French, Emmett Bachmeier, Jasmine Humphrey, Barbara Dillon, and Ralph Wilkerson) didn’t have to scuff or wear down the soles of their expensive, shiny shoes that they were required to wear (although, how far the walk from their apartment to the subway wasn’t their problem, they had no control over that).

Maybe once a month or—so far this particular year, every other month—an alarm is set off thanks to a development gone wrong but, other than that, there’s never any noteworthy commotion because the people in charge don’t pay their engineers and scientists to make commotions, they pay for results and the kind of results that they want aren’t meant to make noise until they’ve been perfected.

It’s nondescript and quiet and undisturbed and there’s only one guard in the front by the iron fence because they don’t pay their employees (and don’t pay for this _land_ ) for commotions to happen and every other month an alarm goes off.

It’s all of that except for today when a large black van comes roaring up the road, stops an inch away from the fence and a man dressed in black waits for the guard to put down his newspaper, come out of his little guard shack and ask what exactly was going on before rolling down his window, leaning out and shooting him in the leg and shoulder.

Only two other people inside see what happens: a second guard on the floor which was technically the basement (even though there were at least two other floors underneath that one) who, coincidentally, looks at the screen for the camera by the guard shack just at the right time and John Garrett who was currently on the very top floor in the supervisor’s office having a discussion about a favor he was thinking of cashing in and had chosen that exact moment to look out the window.

 

— — — —

 

Grant knows that—with both him and Ollie pointing guns at him—the guard might have very likely opened the gates for them either out of a sense of self preservation or because he knew that there would be about twenty more weapons pointed at them as soon as they walked in through the glass front doors but he had chosen to shoot him instead.

 _You didn’t have to do that_ , the voice says. It’s right. A lot of people in his life have been right about a lot of things lately and the wrongness of himself was starting to weigh on him. Ollie gives him a look from the passenger seat after he does it, the same time the voice says what it says and, for a brief moment it almost seems as if Ollie had telepathically sent those words to him. He had no right to judge him—he’d killed a lawyer yesterday (and _shit_ this week was simultaneously the shortest and longest he’s had in a long time) because someone _told him_ to but then Grant realizes he’s projecting; there wasn’t really judgment there. A look closer, and Ollie was staring, thinking, asking him _that’s how this is gonna be_ , without being able to speak.

“You wanted to come,” Grant says, opening the car door to head to the guardhouse to find the right button to open the gates. It wasn’t Grant’s fault that Ollie signed up for something without knowing what he was signing up for (they were both already guilty of that; maybe it was a common bad habit they shared). He opens it fairly easily and he’s walking back to the van when he hears the _crack_ of a gunshot, looks to see the top half of Ollie leaning out his window, rifle in hand and, for two seconds, Grant thinks that Ollie has shot him but he’s not in pain, he’s not leaking. He turns his head and there, on the pale stone walkway leading to the front doors, is a security guard on his knees, hands holding a blossoming circle of blood.

Grant doesn’t say anything, doesn’t acknowledge it because he’s too disappointed in himself for not hearing the man coming and he walks the rest of the way to the van, rounds the back of it, opens the double doors and hauls out the duffel bag he’d packed, but he’s not expecting to need anything but the extra ammo inside, slings it over his shoulder. He watches Ollie, doesn’t realize what he’s looking for until he notices that he doesn’t see it: no dead, glassy eyes. He hasn’t slipped but there’s a stiffness to his shoulders that could have simply been the concealed pain from his unmedicated broken jaw. Grant considers asking him if he’s alright but changes his mind because he knows that he isn’t.

It was tempting to get back in the van and simply crash it right through the front doors but that wasn’t how he wanted to do things so he leaves it behind, tucks the keys under the mat on the passenger’s side because if they get separated, if he _dies_ , Ollie, Jemma and Fitz (or whatever combination thereof that was left and Grant is damn well going to make sure that Jemma will _always_ be one of them, whether she (worst case scenario) was on her own or not) could still have a way out.

Two surprises next: the building hadn’t been put into _total_ lockdown, preventing the two of them from even _entering_ , and the lobby they walk into is completely empty, the phone ringing but no receptionist there to answer. There’s a strip of light stretching across the floor, just a few feet away from the doors that turns red when Grant and Ollie pass over it and a screen on the wall to the left starts yelling at them:

“WEAPON DETECTED. WEAPON DETECTED. WEAPON DETEC—” Grant wastes a bullet on it and it stops talking. Noisy. It seems almost absurdly impractical, set to cause the most amount of agitation and Grant glares at the popping and sparking damaged tech. With this, with no one here and only two guards, Grant would almost believe that this was a decoy, a furniture store set-up to show you how nice your office _could_ look if you had the money for it. He glances at Ollie, who looks just as perturbed as Grant feels.

 _Something's wrong,_ the voice starts to sing, _I don't know what it is. Something's wro—_

_—ound Control to Major Tom. Ground Control to Major Tom. Take your protein pills and put your helmet on…_

The voice, interrupted by a song being played loud, crystal clear, and Grant looks up, looks around but he can’t actually _see_ where it was coming from, couldn’t find the speakers, the system it was being sent through. He gets the same feeling through his body that he had when he’d woken up to hear it in Jemma’s apartment: the fist around his heart, blood rushing in his head.

_Ground Control to Major Tom, commencing countdown, engines on. Check ignition and may God's love be with you…_

There’s a buzzing behind his eyes and he glances at Ollie but it doesn’t seem to be affecting him in the same way; he looks puzzled and concerned, like there’s been a ghostly shadow hanging on Grant’s back this entire time but he’s only just seeing it now. It’s a coincidence. It’s a prank. The elevator music was leaking into the rest of the building but then the song shuts off and he thinks it was glitch, it wasn’t anything at all but then an all-too familiar voice replaces it, fills in the next verse, off-key.

“This is Ground Control to Major Tom. You've really made the grade. And the papers want to know whose shirts you wear. Now it's time to leave the capsule if you dare...” A pause. The back of Grant’s neck starts to sweat. “The next part’s all yours, Major.” Grant’s palms are clammy and he grips his gun tighter, swallows. He looks to Ollie again, who’s face had blanched, eyes widened, the muscles in his jaw moving like he desperately wanted to _say something_ , except he seems more bothered by _who_ was speaking then what exactly he was saying.

Grant had assumed that the song was the same for all the others but now he wasn’t sure. This soon after being pulled free, Ollie should have been far more influenced than he appeared to be; it took Grant almost a year to not so much as snap into attention when the voice sang a few words from it; now all it did was give him what a professional might call a ‘panic attack’ but what Grant called a wild improvement over how things used to be.

Hearing this particular _voice_ now though, Grant was pretty sure that ‘panic’ wasn’t an improvement of much of anything.

“No?” Garrett asks, sounds discontent. “It seems your time away from me has been productive.” The crackle of an open line. “It also seems you’ve managed to recruit another of my soldiers.” Another? The word sticks out and Grant holds onto it to dissect later, instead focuses on the fact that Garrett must be able to see them, that he was _watching_ them and Grant scans the high ceilings, the white tile and curved, bright lights but he can’t pick out an obvious camera. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Ollie take a step closer to him and there’s sweat beading on his forehead, a green starting to replace the pallor on his face. Grant wants to speak to him, tell him not to be sick because he’ll asphyxiate on it and Grant didn’t want to have to pry the wires holding his jaw together apart just so that didn’t happen but he can’t make any words come out. “But since I _know_ I just spoke to Sweet Polly Oliver early yesterday morning…” He trails off, doesn’t finish his sentence, but it isn’t necessary; Grant hears the first two chords of a song he doesn’t know and—as if an explosion had gone off and he had to protect him from the shrapnel—Grant flings himself onto Ollie, crouches the both of them, drapes himself over his body and clamps his upper arms around Ollie’s head, presses hard against his ears.

(It’s probably uncomfortable, probably hurts his jaw like a son-of-a-bitch but if it stopped Garrett from potentially rebuilding that cage, it would be worth it.)

The song carries on for what feels like hours but was most likely only a couple minutes before Garrett turns it off but Grant keeps Ollie’s head down for a few seconds after, just in case, and he hears Garrett grunt, clear his throat. Grant pulls his arms away slowly and Ollie lifts his head, tilts it slightly. He looks surprised, almost slightly _pleased_ , but then he frowns when Grant says:

“You have to go.” Grant watches him shake his head. “I don’t have anything else that’ll stop you from hearing it.” Grant couldn’t keep hiding Ollie and—despite the amount of progress he’s already made in such a short amount of time—Grant didn’t trust him to cover his own ears when it started. “Wait at the van. Keep an eye out. Watch my back.” Frustration. So many things he wanted to say, to argue, but he couldn’t. He indicates to his own chest with his thumb, flattens his hand, slashes it across his throat, points his index and middle fingers to his eyes and then gestures outside.

 _I can’t watch your back from out there_ , the voice interprets for him. Grant’s about to say something in response—to Ollie or the voice, he’s not sure—but he’s stopped by Garrett speaking again.

“I hate to break up whatever it is you two girls are gossiping about but would you care to tell me exactly what you two are doing here and why you’ve killed two of our guards?” He’d given up trying to get either of them back on his side almost suspiciously fast. Either he had something else up his sleeve, some sort of back-up plan he was stalling until he could put it into effect, or he’s already written the two of them off as acceptable-losses as Grant thought he might have done and figured the music was simply worth a shot. Grant narrows his eyes, picks a random spot on the ceiling and speaks to it. (‘Our guards’. Like he owned the place. He probably _thought_ he did.)

“You’re holding someone here. I want her back.”

“Her?” Garrett chuckles. “Who is this ‘her’?”

“Jemma Simmons,” Grant says. He can hear Garrett stepping away but he leaves the line open. Grant can hear him talking, muttering to someone else who must have been in the room and then he comes back.

“Sorry. Don’t know her.”

“Try again,” Grant says. “And this time, don’t lie to me.”

“Oh. Well,” Garrett laughs again, lets it out along with an amused breath. “Looks like Major Tom has grown a pair since I last saw him.”

“ _Stop_ calling me that,” Grant snaps, can’t help it and every time Garrett laughs at him, his skin crawls.

“Sorry, _Mister Ward_.” A put-upon sigh. “But fine. I’ve been told that there _is_ a Jemma Simmons here. But— Hang on.” A head turned away from whatever he was speaking into, more muttering. “Apparently she has something we want and they’re not going to give her up until she, well. Until _she_ gives it up.”

“Wrong answer.” Grant straightens his back and, for the first time since they’ve walked in, he starts looking for an elevator, a door that lead to stairs, _some_ way that would bring them into the rest of the building. He’s prepared to go floor by floor if he has to, even though the slow progress of it would be putting Jemma’s life at risk. He had to hope that they’d keep her alive until she told them where she was keeping whatever it was she had created and that she was strong enough not to tell them. “Try again.”

“Sorry, I don’t make the rules,” Garrett says. “I’m just a client with a bit more clout than the others. Normally this would be none of my business but when I saw it was _you_ … I couldn’t pass up a reunion.” A pause. “HYDRA is very particular about intellectual property. I don’t think you’re getting your girlfriend back.” In his visual search for a way to go, Grant’s gaze finally settles on it: there, by the wall on the far right, is a black anomaly in the tile. There was his eye. Grant walks over, stares up at it, lifts his pistol.

“Wrong answer,” he says, and shoots the camera.

 

— — — —

 

An angular, sharp-cornered staircase, the thud of boots, rattle of metal weapons and when Grant kicks open the door for the next floor up, it’s loud enough that someone in a room nearby yelps. Grant follows the sound, slams the door open and stares down a group of five people in white coats, huddled together near a waist-high table, discarded metal parts left behind, tools dropped on the hard grey floor. Had they only just reacted this way, scattered at the sound of their entrance, or did they know they were coming, told to stay put and wait it out? And where the hell were the rest of the guards? Grant refused to believe that a facility like this only had two uniforms to spare, to watch everyone.

Maybe it was protocol. Let it happen, deal with the damage during the aftermath, replace who needs to be replaced and sweep it under the rug. Evacuations, men with guns… That could wind up in the news and that seemed to be _exactly_ where HYDRA didn’t want to be unless it was on their own terms.

“Jemma Simmons,” Grant says to the room and there’s a couple seconds of silence until a mousy engineer finally speaks.

“W—We don’t know who that—” He squeaks when Grant lifts his pistol, points it at him, but then shifts it to the right, away from them, shoots a strange metal box plugged into the wall with an extension cord and everyone ducks, yells as it bursts apart, all of them recoiling when Grant points the weapon at them again. “We don’t know!” The same engineer shouts, hands up even though Grant hadn’t told any of them to do that.

_Wrong answer. Bang, bang. But you don’t have to do that._

Grant stares at them for a bit longer but then lowers his arm. Waste of time. Moving on.

The next room is more of the same and so is the one after that. Grant destroys equipment but not a _person_ , not yet, even though he tastes sour pennies in the back of his throat, he _wants it_ and it should scare him and maybe later it would but, for now, he’s doing everything he can not to get sucked down into it. It would be easy to turn this into a massacre—he had come here with that intention in mind, had started the ball rolling by each of them putting down a guard—but he couldn’t let it because there’d be no coming back from that. Three or four criminals, the filthy underbelly in a night is one thing but fifty, _hundreds_ of people (people who may or may not be willingly working here) was quicksand.

(He doesn’t spare a thought that he might have already done it while under Garrett’s influence and just couldn’t remember, a memory that he hadn’t dug deep enough to find yet.)

Another floor and Grant realizes that this isn’t going to work. None of these people knew her—although, upon mentioning her name, a few of the people there furrowed a brow just briefly, a downturn of their mouth as if they were trying to summon something they hadn’t thought about in awhile, as if the name was a thumb trying to flick a lighter but no flame was igniting but Grant was in too much of a hurry to pick at it. She wouldn’t have been paraded through here when they dragged her into the building. But what else could he do? What were his other options?

He could go after Garrett. He’s _right there_. He’s in the building and here Grant is, asking strangers about a woman none of them had seen. As if thinking about him had summoned him, they hear his voice once again, looming over them.

“You done? You had your fun? You want to kick down a couple more doors? Will that make you feel like you’ve accomplishing something?” An exasperated noise, a sharp inhale. “You want something done, you do it yourself.” A piercing whistle and then the line goes dead.

Garrett wouldn’t have come alone. The only question was how many did he bring with him? Instinct would take them back downstairs to the lobby, to the wide open space so they couldn’t be cornered but they’d risk being completely surrounded instead—Grant reopens one of the doors he had previously closed and the scientists look distressed to see them again. He puts a finger to his lips, silences them, and then gestures for them to move towards the farthest wall, to stay down, and then he takes up a position against the just barely shut door (enough to deceive, but not enough for the latch to have clicked), brushes his shoulder against it, waiting. Ollie takes in what he’s doing and then stands on the other side of it, a couple feet back, holds up his rifle.

Could he do this or would he freeze? He would know these people. This wasn’t their fault. They didn’t have control over any of this. Grant flicks his gaze towards Ollie, sees the way his fingers twitch, unsettled. He gets his attention, holds up his own pistol and pats the bottom of the grip with his palm, watches as Ollie flips his rifle, turns it upside-down, the stock now facing the door, the barrel pointing behind him. A firearm turned into a bludgeoning tool.

The faint _ding_ of an elevator arriving, unnerving quiet, and then footsteps. Grant tries to listen, to count, but he can’t tell how many there are. All he knows is that they’re coming. He waits. He waits. Five. Four. Three. Two—

A shadow passing by, blocking the sliver of light through the crack in the door, and then Grant slams his shoulder into it, flings it open and it _thuds_ hard into a body, the person letting out a noise of surprise, the heavy wood sending him into the opposite wall. Ollie is through the doorway, launching forward, smashes the rifle stock into the side of the head of whomever had been in line behind him. Grant follows the line of the door, advances on the man who had taken the impact, doesn’t give him a chance to recover. Two. There’s only two.

Did Garrett really think that this would work?

A hit to the temple with the grip of his sidearm, follows it with a punch, doesn’t worry about Ollie because he knows he can handle it himself and, fairly quickly, the two men were on the floor, incapacitated. Weapons collected even though it’s unlikely either of them were in a position to use them and Grant nods, gestures behind him—they should take a lap, just in case, just to be sure—and the second he turns, a figure rounds the corner and the shot reverberates down the hallway, crashes into his chest.

Radiating pain, every last bit of wind rushing out of his lungs, and it knocks him backwards, he stumbles, trips on the legs of one of the prone men, catches himself and falls sideways against the wall, leaves an opening and he hears a _bang_ and then nothing at all. Grant takes in labored breaths, like a fish pulled out of a lake onto the bottom of a dry boat, looks down slowly, lifts a hand and touches the metal slug buried in his bulletproof vest. It’s still warm. A figure comes to his side, moves around in front of him and Grant starts to ready himself for a fight but it’s Ollie and he’s hunching, checking him over efficiently but the damage is fairly clear. Behind Ollie is the unmoving body of the shooter and Grant glances at Ollie’s face, tries to find something there, _anything_ , but he can’t figure out what he’s thinking. Ollie loosens the vest, gives Grant a chance to breathe and then Grant gives him a singular nod, accepts his help in getting back on his feet, and tightens it again.

Every breath hurts. He wouldn’t be surprised if a rib had been fractured but there wasn’t time to deal with it. He could still walk, could still shoot and that was all he needed.

Grant comes to a decision. They wouldn’t find Jemma—and, he remembers off-hand, Fitz—without getting to the higher-ups first. Without getting to _Garrett_ first.

They find the door to the stairwell again and keep going up.

 

— — — —

 

They’re at the sixth floor, about to make their way to the seventh when Garrett fills the space around them again, humming the same song he’d started to play in the lobby and Grant can hear Ollie freeze mid-step. He hesitates himself, backtracks, and he can visibly _see_ his struggle to fight it, to figure out what would happen if he _didn’t_. Ollie reaches down suddenly, grabs Grant’s wrist and, at first, he figures this is the beginning of a skirmish but, instead, he’s curling Grant’s fingers into a fist and then uses his other hand to tap on the side of his own head. Nothing comes of it though, because there’s the sound of a door above them banging open, of feet thudding, two stairs at a time, and three more men in black are heading their way.

Garrett’s voice fades, drops away, and Grant has his pistol out but he doesn’t anticipate the man in the lead launching himself from the middle of the stairs down towards him, tackling Grant, and it’s the fact that Grant was standing so close to the flat ground in the space before the door to the sixth floor offices that he doesn’t break his neck as he falls. A flurry of movements, a punch to the side of his head, and he lifts the hand holding his gun only for it to be grabbed, slammed into the ground enough times that he can’t keep his fingers curled around the grip and he let’s go, uses his other hand to grab at the knife on his other side, pulls it from the sheath and jams it into the thigh of the man on top of him, in a spot that Grant knows will hurt but won’t kill him. Grant knees him in a sensitive area, pushes him off of himself, rolls away, kicks him in the face like a horse while on his hands and knees before he stands.

Ollie is still standing, which was something considering everything currently working against him and Grant grabs one of the men assaulting him by the shoulders, hauls him back, arm around his neck, gets an elbow to the stomach in return. He lets go, pushes him forward, hard enough that he smacks into the wall beside Ollie and the guy braces himself, palms flat but Grant hadn’t done it to do any damage, just to get him in a slightly different position. He walks forward, hand outstretched, slams the man’s head against the wall as he’s pulling away, holds him there.

The man Grant had stabbed is on his feet, makes the decision to go after Grant but then lets out a grunt and Ollie’s beating him back, the one he had been scuffling with earlier now on the ground, bleeding heavily from his nose. The one Grant is holding uses the distraction to reach down, take his own knife in his hand but Grant seizes his wrist, wrenches it from him, sticks him in just about the same spot that he’d done his friend moments before. Instead of letting it stun him like it had the other guy, the man clutches the handle, yanks the knife out and thrusts it behind him without seeing where it was going and Grant feels it slide easily into his upper thigh.

He stumbles backwards, can’t help it, blinks once, twice, down at the metal buried in him, knows that pulling it out would be a thousand times worse than leaving it in and tacky blood brings a sheen to his pant leg. He abandons his desire not to kill any of them, goes for his pistol before remembering it’s still on the floor, as is the duffel with the rest of the weapons, dropped when he was tackled. The man Ollie had finished with first is still just _sitting_ there and Grant wonders idly what had been done to him that he wasn’t moving but was still awake but then he hears a scream from the fight happening next to him, followed by the _crack_ of a gunshot. The man with Grant’s knife is falling, is doing so right in front of him and, as he goes, Grant makes a grab for his knife, still stuck in him, gets it in his grip and turns, heaves himself back from where he’d come from and plunges it forward at the man who had stabbed _him_ , but he holds up his hands, an instinctively defensive movement, and the sharp metal slides into his palm.

He uses his other hand to punch Grant in the face, his wounded hand still held up in front of his face and Grant grabs the handle of the knife, knows what move he would _want_ to do but can’t, not with his leg the way that it was, propels the hand forward instead and the end sticking out of the back of his hand slices into the man’s forehead. Out of the corner of his eye, Grant can see the third man _finally_ regain some of his senses, his sidearm coming out of his holster and Grant hears the sound of someone trying to get his attention, turns his head to the right just enough to see his own weapon flying towards him and he drops the knife, catches the gun. He shoots the man seconds away from shooting _him_ and then turns it on the man in front of him, pulls the trigger again and watches as blood splatters over the off-white wall.

The last body drops and the silence—save for their heavy breathing—is nearly ear-ringing. Ollie has a cut over his right eye that’s bleeding but it’s not that that Grant holds his gaze on—it’s the way he’s holding his mouth and Grant slowly realizes that, at some point in the fight, the wires holding him together had been snapped, his jaw purposely wrenched apart (as if the man had already _known_ somehow) and Grant flashes back to seconds earlier when he’d heard someone cry out. He’d assumed it’d been one of the other men but now he knows it was _Ollie_. He has no idea how he’s still conscious. He’s not entirely sure how he  _himself_ was still conscious either.

Ollie walks closer, moves over to Grant but stops whatever he was going to do when a leisurely, mocking hand clapping is heard over the speakers and they both look up in the vague direction that the sound was coming from.

“Impressive,” Garrett says. “Seems as if despite it all, my training still paid off. Don’t tell the others, but you two were always my favorites. And because of that, I’m going to offer you a little free advice: go home.” Grant’s feeling light-headed, a little dizzy, and he puts a hand to the knife in his leg, pushes down on the wound around the blade and squeezes his eyes shut, swallows. It would be simple, really. Turn back the way they came, find an elevator, take it to the lobby and then hobble out to the van, climb in the back and waste away while Ollie drives them somewhere else. He let’s himself consider it for a couple of seconds but, if he’s going to die today, he’s going to do it in a fight, he’s going to do it with a gun to Garrett’s head and Jemma standing behind him.

They _could_ take the easy way up but Grant doesn’t trust that someone else in the building didn’t have control over it, wouldn’t send them plummeting or trap them inside. There’s only ten floors, not counting the ones buried under the basement—Grant remembers from the blueprints—and he takes a step forward, flounders, but then feels an arm around his shoulders, propping him up and he and Ollie start the laborious climb.

 

— — — —

 

By the ninth floor, Grant feels simultaneously as if his body is too heavy and that there’s a piece of him floating away from himself, barely connected by an invisible thread. His anger is the only thing fueling him, keeping him walking—that, and the person beside him holding him up, the one who was suffering too, leaving a trail of red-tinted saliva behind them as they moved like some sickly sort of snail—and the voice in his head is screaming at him to stop—

( _You have to stop. We won’t make it. Stop. Cease._

 _No_ , Grant replies in his own head, speaks to it and he knows he shouldn’t, he has to stop treating it as an entity but at least he’s not talking to it out loud this time.

 _Are you sure? Control is not convinced._ Grant stops responding. _Hello, Major Tom, are you receiving?_ )

—but he won’t, because Garrett is _there_ , he’s close and he’s waiting for him.

The tenth floor, nowhere else to go except for the roof and he puts fingers on the handle, leans against the door but it won’t budge. He hits it with a barely closed fist, lets out a noise he didn’t think he’s ever made before, diverts his gaze up towards the ceiling because he _knows_ he’s watching. The phone deep in his pocket, the one he forgot was even there, starts buzzing and he fumbles it, takes it out, and Daisy is _calling_ him, not just texting and he thinks about ignoring it but he can’t.

“Yeah?”

“It’s unbelievable,” Daisy is laughing, “You’d think people like HYDRA would have better security and yeah, in the bowels they sure as hell do, but their cameras all run on the same software and I just… I can see _everything_. Call me Argus Johnson.”

“That’s great,” Grant tells her. He’s fading. He can feel it. He thinks about asking her if she could do anything about the doors but he has a feeling that it’s not something she’d be able to tackle remotely. Instead, he asks: “You got eyes on the tenth floor?”

“Sure,” she says. _Clack, clack, clack_. “Hey you... uh... You sound kinda funny. You cool? I figured I’d take a chance giving you a verbal shout out but I didn’t think you’d _answer_.” Grant presses his forehead against the cool metal of the door, breathes out a sigh.

“Tenth floor,” Grant says instead of being honest.

“Tenth floor, yeah, yeah, I got it. Let me just—” A sharp intake. “Holy shit, dude. Garrett’s here.” Grant isn’t surprised she knows what he looks like. Pictures of him didn’t exist in abundance but, if anyone were to find one, it would be her.

“Yeah,” Grant says. “I know.” Another breath. Inhale. Exhale. “What’s he doing?”

“He’s in a room. A big office, looks like. It’s him, some guy in a suit. Two… Yeah, two men in black, some nerdy looking dude and— Jemma. Jemma’s in there.” Either she’d been there the entire time and Garrett had been toying with them or the person in the charge had sent someone to find her, figured they were better off keeping her close. The nerdy-looking dude that Daisy mentions could have been a random engineer, wrong place, wrong time but Grant doubted it. It was probably Fitz. _The gang’s all here._ “She doesn’t look hurt.” _Clack, clack_. “...Ward?” He doesn’t respond. “Ward, is that blood?” She can see him. She found him, she’s staring right at him. There’s a nervous vibration in her voice when she asks. “Look, I can call in a bomb threat. The police will be there, full force, in, like, ten minutes.”

“No. I'll be—” He can’t get the rest of his words out, can’t keep himself upright anymore. He hears Daisy shouting at him, drops the phone, and collapses.

 

— — — —

 

When he comes to, he’s sitting in a chair, unrestrained, as if the person who put him there assumed he wouldn’t be fit to slap someone and he lifts his head, struggles to regain some clear vision, enough to take in his surroundings but the very first thing he sees is Garrett’s shark-like grin staring down at him.

“There he is,” Garrett says, his voice rough, low. He takes a step back, gives Grant an opportunity to see the rest of the room. He’s in an expansive office—the one, most likely, that Daisy had mentioned—a long almost conference-like desk stretching along the room, a window across from him taking up the entire wall, looking out towards the rest of the world, to the city. Jemma is trapped in a chair on the other side of the desk, the man who must have been Fitz beside her, a balding man in a thousand dollar suit sweating in the corner, a phone in his hand that he keeps flipping, turning over and over, anxious, as if he’s waiting to make a call or waiting to receive one. Two of Garrett’s soldiers, on either side of Jemma and Fitz, standing at attention, waiting for orders. He turns his head, feels his stomach twist when he sees Ollie _standing_ beside him, holding a weapon, his broken jaw still hanging open, his eyes seemingly unfocused. “You’ve looked better, Major.”

Grant mutters something but he’s not sure what it was supposed to be. Garrett seems to take it as an insult, surprises him by coming forward, smacking him hard across the face which does him the favor of striking some clarity back into him. Jemma makes a noise behind him, from where’s she’s sitting, a cry of sympathy or maybe horror, outrage.

“The only reason you’re still _alive_ right now is because I had my men drag you in here, you ungrateful _ass_ ,” Garrett says, leans his hands on the arms of the chair Grant is in and Grant glances down, sees that someone had removed the knife, tied off just above the wound to slow the bleeding. “I can very easily loosen that and let you bleed out like a stuck pig.” He steps to the side, grabs Grant’s chin aggressively, holds it steady and points his face towards Jemma. “I was supposed to go home an hour ago. Get this over with. Tell your girlfriend to give HYDRA what they want.”

“Jemma…” Grant starts, knows he isn’t going to say what Garrett wants him to but Jemma doesn’t know that, shakes her head. She won’t. Despite everything that happened, everything that _will happen_ , she won’t do what they want. He admires that, in a way.

(The man assumed to be Fitz is being unusually silent but his eyes keep sweeping the room as if searching for something specific, gaze frequently landing on the balding man in the corner, who kept looking shamefully away and Grant wonders if Garrett had been fudging the truth when he said he was just a ‘client with some clout’.)

“You know,” Garrett says, drops his hand from Grant’s face, “Fun fact about girly over there. I didn’t recognize her until she was actually brought in. It’s been, what? Two years? Two and a half? I may not be so good with names but I never forget a face.” Grant frowns, looks from Jemma to Garrett. (Seeing his face, being in his _presence_ , was drowning him in rage, in _fear_ , and if he wasn’t so near-delirious from blood loss, it might have been easy to let it all completely overwhelm him. He’s spent so much time since breaking free trying to find him again, to settle the score, and now that he was here, they were breathing the same air, his hands were shaking; if he had a weapon, one of his guns, he could eliminate every single bad soul in the room, end it riddled with bullet holes but it would be worth it.) Garrett grins all teeth at him again. “Uh oh. You don’t know.” He leans down, rests an elbow on the arm of Grant’s chair, speaks conspiratorially, points at Jemma. “She used to work here.” A look towards Jemma. “Tell him, sweetheart.”

She doesn’t part her lips, looks ashamed, her eyes wet and, if Grant hadn’t seen the look on her face, he would have believed that Garrett was simply lying to make him distrust her, to make him _want_ to convince her to give in, to have one less person on her side.

“ _Tell him_ ,” Garrett insists, whistles, gestures to the man standing closest to Jemma. “Henry.” A gun to the side of her head and she shuts her eyes briefly, bites her bottom lip and then opens them, stares at Grant.

“I worked for HYDRA for a year,” Jemma says, “It was when I first got to the city, before I realized what kinds of people they were, what kind of person _Garrett_ was. I didn’t want to tell you because I thought— I thought you wouldn’t help me if you knew. I recognized you the second that I saw you, when you stopped that man from attacking me. You used to come with Garrett when he would visit the facility. You and a few others.” The ringing starts in his ears, it drowns out everything but, somehow, not Jemma. He can still hear her, which is exactly the _last_ thing he thinks he wants. “The device that I made… I came up with it while I worked here but I left for SHIELD before I could properly develop it.

“I put it out of my mind, I forgot about it but I met Fitz—” A flickered look to him (confirmation) and he swallows, looks guilty, like he believes this entire thing was his fault, “—I let it slip, told him about my idea and he encouraged me to see if I could put it together with SHIELD tech and I _could_. What I made could help people, people like _you_ , like your friend,” Grant glances at Ollie, who’s still there by his side, watching everything, saying nothing. “I don’t know how HYDRA found out about it. That part was true. But they told me since I came up with the idea while working for them, it _belonged_ to them.

“That I stole it. But I can’t let them have it.” Jemma’s tearful now, talking through it, her voice shaking, loud, like she’s making sure that Grant can’t claim to have not heard her. “They want to reverse it. They want to use it to _make_ more soldiers like you were and make it impossible for you to—“ She doesn’t get to finish, Garrett whistling through his teeth, and the man dressed in black delivers a swift blow to the side of her head. Not hard enough to knock her out, but enough to keep her quiet.

Even without an addled, drifting brain, this would be a lot to process. Grant was well aware of sins of the past, of putting your well-being in the hands of the wrong person, being lead down a dark path and clawing your way back towards sunlight. He could be forgiving of that, even for someone who had worked for HYDRA, but it was the _lying_ that was making him see tinges of red. If she had been upfront with him, he would have understood. They might have been able to work something out but she had kept it under wraps (out of fear; unsubstantiated but she couldn’t have known that) and the damaged part of Grant that still had difficulty trusting people was whispering that this story was a falsity as well. She still worked here. She still worked for _him_. This was all an elaborate trap to get Grant back (‘you two were always my favorites’, he had said and Grant doesn’t challenge that in the slightest).

 _Bear trap_ , the voice says, sounds distant, as if speaking to him from the bottom of a well and Grant wonders if it had started to leak out with the rest of his blood, _Snap. Leg. Not broken. Just weighed down._

Grant looks at Jemma, keeps his gaze focused directly on her.

He comes to a decision.

“I’m going to get you out of here,” he says to her and then he stands up. There is no plan, no _ideas_ of what he could do, but the men by Jemma and Fitz were the greatest threat, he had to assume that Garrett was carrying something and, if not, he could disarm Ollie but then Garrett is grabbing him by the collar, holding him. He’s too slow. Grant can hear the _click click_ of two firearms getting ready to fire but the _bangs_ that come next aren’t from their guns but from the one beside Grant—Ollie has his rifle raised and the two men in black are dropping. There’s a blow to his stomach and, as he staggers backwards, it’s accompanied by a hard kick and he falls, trips over the chair he was just in and goes tumbling with it, follows it to the floor, turns his body as best he can so as not to land on his bad leg.

Ollie has his gun trained on Garrett but hasn’t pulled the trigger like he doesn’t want it to be that easy or as if he somehow knows that Grant has been waiting for this for a hell of a lot longer than he had, although he didn’t deserve to finish it any less than he did.

“Clever,” Garrett is saying, _laughing_ , and Grant uses the chair to prop himself up, to help him stand and, just past Garrett’s shoulder, Grant can see Jemma struggling with the restraints, pulling and fighting with them, now that there was only one bureaucratic pair of eyes trained on her. “Well, boys, you got me.” But he’s reaching non-to-subtly into his jacket, starts to pull out a pistol because he could control his men with words alone but these two wouldn’t work, wouldn’t go for it, but he shouts, drops his hand away when Ollie shoots him in the foot. Grant lets go of the chair, stands on his own, punches Garrett across the jaw, grabs his coat and takes the firearm from him but Garrett is just laughing and laughing with a mouthful of blood. “There’ll still be soldiers out there. Still under my control except this time they aren’t going to have anyone to—”

_My mama said: "To get things done, you'd better not mess with Major Tom."_

Grant shoots him in the chest.

Garrett looks shocked, offended, as if—even with all his posturing, his teasing—there was a part of him that expected Grant to allow him a motive rant, to second-guess what he wanted to do and talk this out or, possibly _let him go_. He puts a hand to the new hole, pushes down on it, opens his mouth and tries to speak but then seems to realize something, grins one last time and falls.

That was it. It was done. It was all done. _Everything_ was done. He wishes he could have humiliated him more, that there was something else, something more than _this_ , a sudden shot to the chest and a slowly fading life on a grey carpet floor but, maybe, this was exactly what Garrett had earned. Few witnesses, no fanfare. Whatever Grant thought he was going to feel after this, he hadn’t expected the complete and total _hollowness_ that he was left with. He still didn’t feel like a person, like a _human_. He still didn’t—

“ _Ward_ ,” Jemma interrupts, calls to him through the fog and he snaps his head up to see the supervisor holding one of the dropped guns, hands quivering, his head pouring with sweat, face flushed bright red.

“All I wanted was what was rightfully _ours_. If she had just _given it_ to us we could have avoided— But she had to find _you_ and now people are _dead_ and who'll be expected to clean this up? _Me._ I didn’t sign up for this, I don’t _want_ —” He’s taking steps forward, he’s speaking like he wants to shoot Jemma but he’s pointing the gun in straight ahead of him, as if he knew he and Ollie were the bigger threats. He’s holding it like he’s never even so much as _touched_ one before, which is the only reason Grant hasn’t fired at him yet. He's falling apart, but he's doing it out of fear more than anger. Reaction but no action and easily disarmed.

A leg darts out in front of the supervisor—it was Fitz, still in his chair because their hands had been restrained but not their ankles—and trips him but, as he falls, his finger pulls on the trigger, the gun goes off, he lands hard on his face and everything goes deathly silent. He missed, a wild shot from a panicked man who didn’t know how to handle a firearm but then he looks to Jemma and Fitz, sees that they’re not staring wide-eyed at him, not at each other, not at the man on the floor groaning with a broken nose and shattered teeth, but at Ollie. Grant turns and almost wishes that he hadn’t.

The hole in his head isn’t perfect, not neat in the center of his forehead. He’s still standing, _blinks_ once, one eye closing before the other but then his scrambled brain seems to realize it’s supposed to be dead and he drops to his knees, hesitates, and then falls backwards, crumpling on the floor.

The world slows, his heart thuds loud in his ears and he tightens his grip on Garrett’s pistol, drags his leg over to where the supervisor was still lying and it’s his wrath again that’s keeping him awake, alert. Grant kicks the discarded gun away from his reach, points his own down at the man’s head. His breathing is short, coming fast through clenched teeth and his hand has never felt steadier. But then:

“Ward, _don’t_.” He barely hears it and he keeps the pistol directed at the supervisor but he surprises himself by not doing anything more. “Ward.” She sounds close. There’s movement, a body just in his periphery. She must have finally gotten herself out of her restraints. Fitz says her name, warning, as if she’s approaching a frightened dog because those were sometimes more dangerous than an angry one and she says something in response but Grant doesn’t catch what it is. “Please,” she says. “No more.” No more bloodshed. The man on the floor whimpers, cowers, but he doesn’t beg. She’s right by Grant’s side, looks down at the supervisor. “You’ll let us go.” He nods. “You’ll let us go and you’ll leave me alone. You’ll tell everyone in HYDRA to leave us all alone. What I made—”

“It’s yours!” The supervisor says, holds up his hands, hides his face as if he thought it would do him any good if Grant decided to take a shot. He changes his mind so fast it could give someone whiplash but Grant supposes that can happen when you’re facing your own mortality. “Go! I’ll explain— It’s— It’s not worth this.” All that effort put into trying to get their claws on it, Grant doubted that was true. One man speaking for an entire company was a _worthless_ promise and Jemma must be able to tell that he’s not falling for it because there’s a hand on his arm, tethering him. “I _swear_. I _swear_ we won’t— Garrett’s death will take _months_ to fix, to cover, to _deal with_. What you’ve done here— There won’t be _time_ to go after you again.”

“They’ll leave us alone,” Jemma is saying and it takes Grant a couple seconds to realize that she’s speaking to _him_. Grant bends down the best he can, grabs the man by the collar and hauls him to his feet, shoves him back against a wall, holds the barrel of the gun against his forehead and he’s pushing it so hard that his hand is shaking (or maybe that’s the rage catching up with him physically, the anger at him for what he’s done, at Jemma for talking him down, at himself for allowing it). “ _Ward_.”

Grant drops his hand, dismantles the gun without looking at it, and tosses the pieces on the floor. He’s left an indent behind on his head. He punches him once, twice, three times, until he’s back on the ground. He goes over to where the other man in black had fallen, takes his knife, grabs at his weapon and considers dismantling that one too, but changes his mind, gives that treatment to Garrett’s gun instead and replaces it with Garrett’s soldier’s weapon. His head is still spinning. The adrenaline is already starting to wear off and he knows that any minute now he could fall and not get back up again.

Jemma had untied Fitz while he did what he did and three of them start to make their way towards the door, Grant in front of them just in case there were some stragglers left behind, some itchy-trigger fingers no longer with a leader to tell them whether they should take the killshot or not but he stops before he passes Ollie’s body. Ideally, he would pick him up, bring his body with them and take care of it properly, not left to languish beside the body of the man who made him, not to leave him there to be cleaned up by HYDRA, _disposed of_ , but he hardly has the energy to keep _himself_ upright and he’s certain that Jemma and Fitz wouldn’t be able to carry him on their own.

(Fitz is trying to say something, stammering, an apology because he thought he was helping, he was the one who tripped him but it only takes a fiery glare from Grant for him to close his mouth. The only reason Grant hasn't  _touched_ him is because he's Jemma's friend, and he can't imagine that she'd turn the other cheek if he did.)

The duffel bag of his weapons had been discarded, pushed off to the side and he retrieves it, slings it over his shoulder but still, he doesn’t leave.

He waits for the voice to tell him what to do, to spout words at him, to _sing_ but there’s nothing. He can’t tell if it’s gone or if it just didn’t know what to say.

They walk out because they have no choice. They take the elevator and nobody stops them.

The lobby is still a ghost town and they move through it exactly like the inhabitants of one. Grant stumbles once but hands keep him standing, help him along, and there, exactly where he had left it, was the van, untouched. No police. No flashing lights. Daisy hadn’t called them after all. (Daisy. Had she watched the whole thing? What was she doing now?)

“We’ll get in the back, you and me. You can rest,” Jemma is saying to Grant. “Fitz, you can drive this, can’t you?”

“Of course,” Fitz says, sounds completely unsure. In the driver’s seat, door slammed shut, they hear him say _there’re no keys_.

“Under the mat,” Grant says but it sounds like a clone of himself standing outside of his own person had said it instead. Jemma leads him to the back of the van, heaves open the double doors and helps him into the vehicle, slams the doors shut behind him.

“We’re in, Fitz,” she says and Grant listens as the engine starts, as Fitz asks where they’re going. There’s a GPS attached to the dash, taped down with duct tape because Grant hated having it hanging on the windshield and Grant gestures at it, leans his head back against the metal walls of his van and says:

“Home.”


	3. EPILOGUE

Grant Ward does not get the death he thought he wanted.

At some point, while in the van, being driven to where he assumed was his warehouse, he had drifted and the next time that he had woken up he wasn’t on his cot but in a hospital bed instead. A figure—a _blur—_ had leapt up from a chair, let out an exclamation, and was flinging arms around him the best they could.

“We’re friends for life now,” Daisy had said, pulling back but still hovering over him, leaning against the bed’s guardrail, fingers curling around the plastic. There’s a winding of gauze around the inside of her right arm. “You’ve got me inside you.”

“Oh!” A voice from the doorway and both he and Daisy had turned to see Jemma standing there, styrofoam cup of tea in her hands and she had hesitated but then walked in, put her drink down, rested her hand on top of Grant’s, gripped his fingers slightly, smiled. Daisy had asked where she got the tea but didn’t wait for an answer, wandered out of the room, left them alone. “The nurses and doctors all seemed to know who you were when Fitz and I brought you in. They treated you very well.” Her smile faltered, looked almost sad. “Thank you for coming for me. I was foolish to have— And after what I said when we were in that room you had no reason to—”

“Jemma.”

“Yes?”

“It was stupid,” Grant agreed and Jemma had frowned. "But I went in there after you without much of a plan, so maybe I was a little stupid, too." He _never_ went into anything without a plan but he had this time. He had for her. She made him impulsive and a little stupid and that was something new. She had chuckled lightly at that, taken her hand back, picked up her drink.

“I imagine you have a lot to think about. And maybe me being here isn't helping." She was still insecure, still troubled over her deceit and Grant wanted to tell her that, yeah, it hadn't been  _great_ but he also understood. He'd say 'more than she knows' but _he_ knows that wouldn't entirely be accurate. He _wanted_ to say that, but she speaks faster than he can. "I’ll let you rest.” She had started to leave, but stopped when Grant had said:

“You don’t have to. You can stay, if you want.”

Remarkably, she does.

 

— — — —

 

Once he was released, Daisy had driven him back to his warehouse in her sedan, his van already there waiting for him. He paused before leaving the vehicle, stared at the building, at his hands.

“I’m sorry about your friend,” Daisy had said, clutching the steering wheel tightly, “I don’t know if anyone’s said that yet.” Grant said nothing. He’d be lying if he had said that he hadn’t thought about him until now but, the truth was, he thought about it every day, replayed the moment, the guilt of leaving him behind. He had burned down his paper cage only for it not to matter less than twenty-four hours later. “So... now what?”

Another good question. Those boxes, those _memories_ , those _feelings_ of what he’d been through were all he had left. That and his warehouse. Daisy. And maybe Jemma. But what else? Was he equipped to go through the rest of his life without another mission? Without a distraction, support beams to keep the weight of everything he’s done from collapsing on top of him? Who was he, now that he was no longer vengeance?

“You know,” Daisy had said, “Jemma told me about what Garrett and HYDRA had done to you.” A pause. She shouldn't have. But if she hadn't, maybe nobody would and after what they'd been through the past few days, it wouldn't have been exactly fair. “That’s… I mean, it was… It was fucked up." That had been putting it nicely. "And hey, you know... You could have told me. You didn’t have to carry that all by yourself this whole time.” He could tell that she was looking at him but he didn’t look back. “She told me about what she invented, too. What she came up with. And she said Garrett had mentioned that there were more people like you, like Oliver, still out there.” A pause. “Maybe we could help them.” Grant still said nothing. “Well. It’s something to think about. Goodness knows this city could still use a hero like you, at least, if you decide to stick around.”

 

— — — —

 

He thought he had lost the voice, too, but then, the same night he had been brought home, while he was laying on his cot, staring at the ceiling and hoping that maybe tonight he’d actually be able to close his eyes and get some rest, a faint distorted singing had started in the back of his head.

_Can you hear me, Major Tom? Can you hear me, Major Tom? Can you hear me, Major Tom?_

_Can you...._

 

— — — —

 

He spends the seven days after all that barely eating, barely moving and it reminds him of when he had first snapped out of Garrett’s chains, of the time he spent in the woods, allowing himself to waste away until he had realized that it wasn’t going to solve any of his problems.

Grant Ward hadn’t felt like a person in a very long time but now he did and he wasn’t sure that he liked it.

On the eighth day he finds a granola bar in the cabinet under the sink, slowly peels open the metallic wrapper and then picks up his phone, ignores the twenty missed calls and fifty neglected texts from Daisy (except for the one exchange where he had told her he was fine, he just needed time, and she’d replied that she understood but that wasn’t going to shut her up), and calls Jemma. She answers on the second ring.

“How does this device of yours work exactly?”

**Author's Note:**

> When I finished editing this, I realized that this fic read like the pilot episode for a new series. Maybe it is, in a way. I might come back to this 'verse in the future.
> 
> The main song referenced throughout is “Space Oddity” by David Bowie. The other songs that the voice sings pieces from/references are: “Major Tom” by Peter Schilling, “All I Wanna Do” by Sheryl Crow, “Proud Mary” by Creedence Clearwater Revival, “Cold” by Annie Lennox, “The Vampyre of Time and Memory” by Queens of the Stone Age, “Hide Away” by Mick Jagger, “Something’s Wrong” by Violent Femmes, and “Ashes to Ashes” by David Bowie.
> 
> I never mention what Ollie’s trigger song is but I _did_ have one in mind: “Be Good Johnny” by Men At Work.
> 
> I usually create an OC villain whenever I write AUs because I tend to write for fandoms that don’t have a clear-cut bad guy that I can designate to that particular role but this time I did. It was a weird feeling. I almost got through this without writing any significant OCs at all (not counting the characters that were only mentioned by name or showed up in a single scene) but then Ollie happened and I got attached. And then I did what I did at the end because I’m _the worst_.
> 
> (I probably could have replaced Ollie with Triplett, but I felt hinky about silencing his character for pretty much the entire fic and I also wanted to leave the option open to kill someone off. Even though his character dies on the show, I’m don't kill canon characters in fic.)


End file.
